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H AUNTINGS 






BY SPECIAL, AliRAKGEMENT WITH THE AUTHORS. 


Lovell’s International Series of Modern Kovels. 


AT • 

1. Miss Eton of Eton Court. By 

Katharine s. Macquoid. . .30 

2. Hartas MartURIN. By H. F. 

Lester. . . . . .50 

3. Tales of To-Day. By Geo. 

R. Sims. . . . .30 

4. English Life Seen through Yan- 

kee Eyes. By T. C. Crawford. .50 

5. Penny Lancaster, Farmer. By 

Mrs. Bellamy. . . . .50 

6. Under False Pretences. By 

Adeline Sergeant. . . . 50 

7. In Exchange for a Soul, "'y 

Mary Linskill. . . .30 

8. Guilderoy. By Ouida. . 3« 

9. St. Cuthbert’s Tower. By 

Florence Warden. . . .30 

10. Elizabeth Morley. By Katharine 

S. Macquoid. ... 30 

11. Divorce ; or Faithful and 

Unfaithful. By Miss Lee. .5° 

12. Long Odds. By Hawley Smart. .30 

13. On Circumstantial Evidence. 

By Florence Marryat. . .30 

14. Miss Kate ; or Confessions of 

a Caretaker. By Rita. . .30 

15. A Vagabond Lover. By Rita. .20 

1G. The Search for Basil Lyndhurst. 

By Rosa Nouchette Carey . .30 


17. The Wing of Azrael. By M<>r,a 

Caird. . . . .30 

18. The Fog Princes. By F.Warden. .30 

19. John Herring. By S. Baring 

Gould. . . . .50 

20. The Fatal Phryne. By F. C. 

Phillips and C. J. W T ills. . .30 

21. Harvest. By John Strange 

Winter. . . .30 

22. Nehalah. By S. Baring Gould. .50 

23. A Troublesome Girl. The 

Duchess. . . . .30 

24. Derrick Vaughan, Novelist. 

By Edna Lyall. . . .30 

25. Sophy Carmine. By John Strange 

Winter. . . . .30 

2G. the Luck of the House. By 

Adeline Sergeant. . . .30 

27. The Pennycomequicks. By S. 

Baring Gould. . . .50 

28. Jezebel’s Friends. By Dora 

Russell. . . . .30 

29. Comedy of a Country House. 

By Julian Sturgis. . . .80 

30. The Piccadilly Puzzle. By 

Fergus Hume. . . .30 

31. That Other Woman. By Annie 

Thomas. . . . .30 


No RECENT ISSUES. 

32. The Curse of Carne’s Hold. By G. A. Henty. . .30 

33. Uncle Piper of Pipers Hill. By Tasma. ' . . .30 

34. A Life Sentence. By Adeline Sergeant 30 

35. Kit Wyndham. By Frank Barrett 30 

36. The Tree of Knowledge. By G. M. Robins. . . .30 

37. Roland Oliver. By Justin McCarthy. ... .30 

38. Sheba. By Rita. 30 

39. Sylvia Arden. By Oswald Crawfurd. . . . .30 

40. Young Mr. Ainslie's Courtship. By F. C. Phillips. .30 

41. The Haute Noblesse. By Geo. Manville Fenn. . .30 

42. Mount Eden. By Florence Marryat 30 

43. Buttons. By John Strange Winter 30 

44. Nurse Revel’s Mistake. By Florence Warden. . .30 

45. Arminell. By S. Baring Gould 50 

46. The Lament of Dives. By Walter Besant. . . .30 

47. Mrs. Bob. By John Strange Winter. . . . . .30 


48. Was Ever Woman in this Humor Wooed. By Clias. Gibbon. .30 

49. The My t nns Mystery. By Geo. Manville Fenn. . . .30 


Other books by well-known authors are in course of preparation, and will be 
published at regular intervals. 

FRANK F. LOVELL & COMPANY, 

142 & 144 WORTH STREET, NEW YORK. 


HAUNTINGS 


FANTASTIC STORIES. 


Y 


, OtjuU 


BY 


VERNON LEE, 

Author of “ Prince of the Hundred Soups, 
“Miss Brown,” Etc. 



NEW YORK: 

FRANK F. LOVELL & COMPANY, 

142 and 144 Worth Street. 


TZ 3 : 

TitiH 


Copyright, 1890, 

BY 

JOHN W. LOVELL 


PREFACE. 


We were talking last evening — as the blue moon- 
mist poured in through the old-fashioned grated 
window, and mingled with our yellow lamplight at 
table — we were talking of a certain castle whose 
heir is initiated (as folk tell) on his twenty-first 
birthday to the knowledge of a secret so terrible 
as to overshadow his subsequent life. It struck 
us, discussing idly the various mysteries and terrors 
that may lie behind this fact or this fable, that 
no doom or horror conceivable and to be defined 
in words could ever adequately solve this riddle ; 
that no reality of dreadfulness could seem aught 
but paltry, bearable, and easy to face in compari- 
son with this vague we know not what. 

And this leads me to say, that it seems to me 
that the supernatural, in order to call forth those 
sensations, ' terrible to our ancestors and terrible 
but delicious to ourselves, sceptical posterity, must 
necessarily, and with but a few exceptions, remain 
enwrapped in mystery. Indeed, ’tis the mystery that 


viii 


PREFACE. 


touches us, the vague shroud C>f moonbeams that 
hangs about the haunting lady, the glint on the 
warrior’s breastplate, the click of his unseen spurs, 
while the figure itself wanders forth, scarcely out- 
lined, scarcely separated from the surrounding trees ; 
or walks, and sucked back, ever and anon, into the 
flickering shadows. 

A number of ingenious persons of our day, 
desirous of a pocket-superstition, as men of yore 
were greedy of a pocket-saint to carry about in 
gold and enamel, a number of highly reasoning men 
of semi-science have returned to the notion of our 
fathers, that ghosts have an existence outside our 
own fancy and emotion ; and have culled from the 
experience of some Jemima Jackson, who fifty years 
ago, being nine years of age, saw her maiden aunt 
appear six months after decease, abundant proof of 
this fact. One feels glad to think the maiden aunt 
should have walked about after death, if it afforded 
her any satisfaction, poor soul! but one is struck 
by the extreme uninterestingness of this lady’s 
appearance in the spirit, corresponding perhaps to 
her want of charm while in the flesh. Altogether 
one quite agrees, having duly perused the collection 
of evidence on the subject, with the wisdom of these 
modern ghost-experts, when they affirm that you 
can always tell a genuine ghost-story by the cir- 
cumstance of its being about a nobody, its having 


PREFACE . 


ix 


no point or picturesqueness, and being, generally 
speaking, flat, stale, and unprofitable. 

A genuine ghost-story ! But then they are not 
genuine ghost-stories, those tales that tingle through 
our additional sense, the sense of the supernatural, 
and fill places, nay whole epochs, with their strange 
perfume of witchgarden flowers. 

No, alas! neither the story- of the murdered 
King of Denmark (murdered people, I am told, 
usually stay quiet, as a scientific fact), nor of that 
weird woman who saw King James the Poet three 
times with his shroud wrapped ever higher; nor 
the tale of the finger of the bronze Venus closing 
over the wedding-ring, whether told by Morris in 
verse patterned like some tapestry, or by Merimee 
in terror of cynical reality, or droned by the ori- 
ginal mediaeval professional storyteller, none of 
these are genuine ghost-stories. They exist, these 
ghosts, only in our minds, in the minds of those 
dead folk ; they have never stumbled and fumbled 
about, with Jemima Jackson's maiden aunt, among 
the arm-chairs and rep sofas of reality. 

They are things of the imagination, born there, 
bred there, sprung from the strange confused heaps, 
half-rubbish, half-treasure, which lie in our fancy, 
heaps of half-faded recollections, of fragmentary 
vivid impressions, litter of multi-coloured tatters, 
and faded herbs and flowers, whence arises that 


X 


PREFACE. 


odour (we all know it), musty and damp, but pene- 
tratingly sweet and intoxicatingly heady, which 
hangs in the air when the ghost has swept through 
the unopened door, and the flickering flames ol 
candle and fire start up once more after waning. 

The genuine ghost ? And is not this he, or 
she, this one born of ourselves, of the weird places 
we have seen, the strange stories we have heard — 
this one, and not the aunt of Miss Jemima Jackson ? 
For what use, I entreat you to tell me, is that 
respectable spinster's vision ? Was she worth 
seeing, that aunt of hers, or would she, if followed, 
have led the way to any interesting brimstone or 
any endurable beatitude ? 

The supernatural can open the caves of Jamschid 
and scale the ladder of Jacob : what use has it got 
if it land us in Islington or Shepherd's Bush ? It 
is well known that Dr. Faustus, having been offered 
any ghost he chose, boldly selected, for Mephis- 
topheles to convey, no less a person than Helena of 
Troy. Imagine if the familiar fiend had summoned 
up some Miss Jemima Jackson's Aunt of Antiquity ! 

That is the thing — the Past, the more or less 
remote Past, of which the prose is clean obliterated 
by distance — that is the place to get our ghosts 
from. Indeed we live ourselves, we educated 
folk of modern times, on the borderland of the 
Past, in houses looking down on its troubadours’ 


PREFACE. 


xi 


orchards and Greek folks’ pillared courtyards ; and 
a legion of ghosts, very vague and changeful, are 
perpetually to and fro, fetching and carrying for 
us between it and the Present. 

Hence, my four little tales are of no genuine 
ghosts in the scientific sense ; they tell of no 
hauntings such as could be contributed by the 
Society for Psychical Research, of no spectres that 
can be caught in definite places and made to dictate 
judicial evidence. My ghosts are what you call 
spurious ghosts (according to me the only genuine 
ones), of whom I can affirm only one thing, that 
they haunted certain brains, and have haunted, 
among others, my own and my friends’ — yours, 
dear Arthur Lemon, along the dim twilit tracks, 
among the high growing bracken and the spectral 
pines, of the south country; and yours, amidst 
the mist of moonbeams and olive-branches, dear 
Flora Priestley, while the moonlit sea moaned and 
rattled against the mouldering walls of the house 
whence Shelley set sail for eternity. 


Maiano, near Florence, 
June 1889. 


VERNON LEE. 






























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amour Dure: 

PASSAGES FROM THE DIARY OF 
SPIRIDION TREE K A . 



















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amour 2>ure: 

PASSAGES FROM THE DIARY OF 
SPIRIDION TREPKA . 


PART I. 

Urbania , August 20 th, 1885. — I had longed, these 
years and years, to be in Italy, to come face to 
face with the Past ; and was this Italy, was this 
the Past? I could have cried, yes cried, for dis- 
appointment when I first wandered about Rome, 
with an invitation to dine at the German Embassy 
in my pocket, and three or four Berlin and Munich 
Vandals at my heels, telling me where the best 
beer and sauerkraut could be had, and what the 
last article by Grimm or Mommsen was about. 

Is this folly ? Is it falsehood ? Am I not my- 
self a product of modern, northern civilisation ; is 
not my coming to Italy due to this very modern 
scientific vandalism, which has given me a travel- 
ling scholarship because I have written a book like 
all those other atrocious books of erudition and 
3 


4 


HA UNTINGS. 


art-criticism ? Nay, am I not here at Urbania on 
the express understanding that, in a certain number 
of months, I shall produce just another such book ? 
Dost thou imagine, thou miserable Spiridion, thou 
Pole grown into the semblance of a German pedant, 
doctor of philosophy, professor even, author of a 
prize essay on the despots of the fifteenth century, 
dost thou imagine that thou, with thy ministerial 
letters and proof-sheets in thy black professorial 
coat-pocket, canst ever come in spirit into the 
presence of the Past ? 

Too true, alas ! But let me forget it, at least, 
every now and then ; as I forgot it this afternoon, 
while the white bullocks dragged my gig slowly 
winding along interminable valleys, crawling along 
interminable hill-sides, with the invisible droning 
torrent far below, and only the bare grey and 
reddish peaks all around, up to this town of 
Urbania, forgotten of mankind, towered and battle- 
mented on the high Apennine ridge. Sigillo, 
Penna, Fossombrone, Mercatello, Montemurlo — 
each single village name, as the driver pointed it 
out, brought to my mind the recollection of some 
battle or some great act of treachery of former 
days. And as the huge mountains shut out the 
setting sun, and the valleys filled with bluish 
shadow and mist, only a band of threatening 
smoke-red remaining behind the towers and cupolas 
of the city on its mountain-top, and the sound 
of church bells floated across the precipice from 


AMOUR DURE. 


5 


Urbania, I almost expected, at every turning of 
the road, that a troop of horsemen, with beaked 
helmets and clawed shoes, would emerge, with 
armour glittering and pennons waving in the sun- 
set. And then, not two hours ago, entering the 
town at dusk, passing along the deserted streets, 
with only a smoky light here and there under a 
shrine or in front of a fruit-stall, or a fire redden- 
ing the blackness of a smithy ; passing beneath 
the battlements and turrets of the palace. . . . 
Ah, that was Italy, it was the Past ! 

August 2 1 st . — And this is the Present! Four 
letters of introduction to deliver, and an hour's 
polite conversation to endure with the Vice-Prefect, 
the Syndic, the Director of the Archives, and the 
good man to whom my friend Max had sent me for 
lodgings. . . . 

August 22 nd— 27 th . — Spent the greater part of 
the day in the Archives, and the greater part of 
my time there in being bored to extinction by 
the Director thereof, who to-day spouted Aeneas 
Sylvius' Commentaries for three-quarters of an hour 
without taking breath. From this sort of martyr- 
dom (what are the sensations of a former racehorse 
being driven in a cab ? If you can conceive them, 
they are those of a Pole turned Prussian professor) 
1 take refuge in long rambles through the town. 
This town is a handful of tall black houses huddled 
on to the top of an Alp, long narrow lanes trickling 
down its sides, like the slides we made on hillocks 


6 


HAUNTINGS. 


in our boyhood, and in the middle the superb red 
brick structure, turreted and battlemented, of Duke 
Ottobuono’s palace, from whose windows you look 
down upon a sea, a kind of whirlpool, of melancholy 
grey mountains. Then there are the people, dark, 
bushy-bearded men, riding about like brigands, 
wrapped in green -lined cloaks upon their shaggy 
pack-mules ; or loitering about, great, brawny, low- 
headed youngsters, like the parti-coloured bravos 
in Signorelli's frescoes ; the beautiful boys, like so 
many young Raphaels, with eyes like the eyes of 
bullocks, and the huge women, Madonnas or St. 
Elizabeths, as the case may be, with their clogs 
firmly poised on their toes and their brass pitchers 
on their heads, as they go up and down the steep 
black alleys. I do not talk much to these people ; 
I fear my illusions being dispelled. At the corner 
of a street, opposite Francesco di Giorgio’s beauti- 
ful little portico, is a great blue and red advertise- 
ment, representing an angel descending to crown 
Elias Howe, on account of his sewing-machines; 
and the clerks of the Vice-Prefecture, who dine at 
the place where I get my dinner, yell politics, Min- 
ghetti, Cairoli, Tunis, ironclads, &c., at each other, 
and sing snatches of La Fille de Mine. Angot , 
which I imagine they have been performing here 
recently. 

No; talking to the natives is evidently a dangerous 
experiment. Except indeed, perhaps, to my good 
landlord, Signor Notaro Porri, who is just as learned, 


AMOUR DURE. 


7 


and takes considerably less snuff (or rather brushes 
it off his coat more often) than the Director of the 
Archives. I forgot to jot down (and I feel I must 
jot down, in the vain belief that some day these 
scraps will help, like a withered twig of olive or 
a three-wicked Tuscan lamp on my table, to bring 
to my mind, in that hateful Babylon of Berlin, 
these happy Italian days) — I forgot to record that 
I am lodging in the house of a dealer in antiquities. 
My window looks up the principal street to where 
the little column with Mercury on the top rises 
in the midst of the awnings and porticoes of the 
market-place. Bending over the chipped ewers 
and tubs full of sweet basil, clove pinks, and mari- 
golds, I can just see a corner of the palace turret, 
and the vague ultramarine of the hills beyond. 
The house, whose back goes sharp down into 
the ravine, is a queer up-and-down black place, 
whitewashed rooms, hung with the Raphaels and 
Francias and Peruginos, whom mine host regu- 
larly carries to the chief inn whenever a stranger 
is expected ; and surrounded by old carved chairs, 
sofas of the Empire, embossed and gilded wedding- 
chests, and the cupboards which contain bits of old 
damask and embroidered altar-cloths scenting the 
place with the smell of old incense and mustiness ; 
all of which are presided over by Signor Porn's 
three maiden sisters — Sora Serafina, Sora Lodo- 
vica, and Sora Adalgisa — the three Fates in person, 
even to the distaffs and their black cats. 


8 


HA UNTINGS. 


Sor Asdrubale, as they call my landlord, is also 
a notary. He regrets the Pontifical Government, 
having had a cousin who was a Cardinal's train- 
bearer, and believes that if only you lay a table for 
two, light four candles made of dead men's fat, and 
perform certain rites about which he is not very 
precise, you can, on Christmas Eve and similar 
nights, summon up t San Pasquale Baylon, who will 
write you the winning numbers of the lottery 
upon the smoked back of a plate, if you have pre- 
viously slapped him on both cheeks and repeated 
three Ave Marias. The difficulty consists in ob- 
taining the dead men's fat for the candles, and 
also in slapping the saint before he have time to 
vanish. 

“ If it were not for that,” says Sor Asdrubale, 
“ the Government would have had to suppress the 
lottery ages ago — eh ! " 

Sept . 9 th . — This history of Urbania is not with- 
out its romance, although that romance (as usual) 
has been overlooked by our Dryasdusts. Even 
before coming here I felt attracted by the strange 
figure of a woman, which appeared from out of the 
dry pages of Gualterio's and Padre de Sanctis’ 
histories of this place. This woman is Medea, 
daughter of Galeazzo IV. Malatesta, Lord of Carpi, 
wife first of Pierluigi Orsini, Duke of Stimigliano, 
and subsequently of Guidalfonso II., Duke of Ur- 
bania, predecessor of the great Duke Robert II. 

This woman's history and character remind one 


AMOUR DURE . 


9 


of that of Bianca Cappello, and at the same time of 
Lucrezia Borgia. Born in 1556, she was affianced 
at the age of twelve to a cousin, a Malatesta of the 
Rimini family. This family having greatly gone 
down in the world, her engagement was broken, 
and she was betrothed a year later to a member of 
the Pico family, and married to him by proxy at 
the age of fourteen. But this match not satisfying 
her own or her fathers ambition, the marriage by 
proxy was, upon some pretext, declared null, and 
the suit encouraged of the Duke of Stimigliano, 
a great Umbrian feudatory of the Orsini family. 
But the bridegroom, Giovanfrancesco Pico, refused 
to submit, pleaded his case before the Pope, and 
tried to carry off by force his bride, with whom he 
was madly in love, as the lady was most lovely 
and of most cheerful and amiable manner, says an 
old anonymous chronicle. Pico waylaid her litter 
as she was going to a villa of her father’s, and 
carried her to his castle near Mirandola, where he 
respectfully pressed his suit ; insisting that he had 
a right to consider her as his wife. But the lady 
escaped by letting herself into the moat by a rope 
of sheets, and Giovanfrancesco Pico was discovered 
stabbed in the chest, by the hand of Madonna 
Medea da Carpi. He was a handsome youth only 
eighteen years old. 

The Pico having been settled, and the marriage 
with him declared null by the Pope, Medea da 
Carpi was solemnly married to the Duke of Stimig- 


IO 


HA UNTINGS . 


liano, and went to live upon his domains near 
Rome. 

Two years later, Pierluigi Orsini was stabbed 
by one of his grooms at his castle of Stimigliano, 
near Orvieto ; and suspicion fell upon his widow, 
more especially as, immediately after the event, she 
caused the murderer to be cut down by two servants 
in her own chamber ; but not before he had declared 
that she had induced him to assassinate his master 
by a promise of her love. Things became so hot 
for Medea da Carpi that she fled to Urbania and 
threw herself at the feet of Duke Guidalfonso II., 
declaring that she had caused the groom to be killed 
merely to avenge her good fame, which he had 
slandered, and that she was absolutely guiltless of 
the death of her husband. The marvellous beauty 
of the widowed Duchess of Stimigliano, who was 
only nineteen, entirely turned the head of the Duke 
of Urbania. He affected implicit belief in her 
innocence, refused to give her up to the Orsinis, 
kinsmen of her late husband, and assigned to her 
magnificent apartments in the left wing of the 
palace, among which the room containing the 
famous fireplace ornamented with marble Cupids 
on a blue ground. Guidalfonso fell madly in love 
with his beautiful guest. Hitherto timid and do- 
mestic in character, he began publicly to neglect 
his wife, Maddalena Varano of Camerino, with 
whom, although childless, he had hitherto lived 
on excellent terms ; he not only treated with con- 


AMOUR DURE. 


ii 


tempt the admonitions of his advisers and of his 
suzerain the Pope, but went so far as to take 
measures to repudiate his wife, on the score of 
quite imaginary ill-conduct. The Duchess Mad- 
dalena, unable to bear this treatment, fled to the 
convent of the barefooted sisters at Pesaro, where 
she pined away, while Medea da Carpi reigned in 
her place at Urbania, embroiling Duke Guidalfonso 
in quarrels both with the powerful Orsinis, who 
continued to accuse her of Stimigliano’s murder, 
and with the Varanos, kinsmen of the injured 
Duchess Maddalena ; until at length, in the year 
1576, the Duke of Urbania, having become sud- 
denly, and not without suspicious circumstances, 
a widower, publicly married Medea da Carpi two 
days after the decease of his unhappy wife. No 
child was born of this marriage ; but such was 
the infatuation of Duke Guidalfonso, that the new 
Duchess induced him to settle the inheritance of 
the Duchy (having, with great difficulty, obtained 
the consent of the Pope) on the boy Bartolommeo, 
her son by Stimigliano, but whom the Orsinis re- 
fused to acknowledge as such, declaring him to be 
the child of that Giovanfrancesco Pico to whom 
Medea had been married by proxy, and whom, in 
defence, as she had said, of her honour, she had, 
assassinated; and this investiture of the Duchy of 
Urbania on to a stranger and a bastard was at 
the expense of the obvious rights of the Cardinal 
Robert, Guidalfonso’ s younger brother. 


12 


HA UN TINGS. 


In May 1579 Duke Guidalfonso died suddenly 
and mysteriously, Medea having forbidden all access 
to his chamber, lest, on his deathbed, he might re- 
pent and reinstate his brother in his rights. The 
Duchess immediately caused her son, Bartolommeo 
Orsini, to be proclaimed Duke of Urbania, and her- 
self regent ; and, with the help of two or three 
unscrupulous young men, particularly a certain 
Captain Oliverotto da Narni, who was rumoured 
to be her lover, seized the reins of government 
with extraordinary and terrible vigour, marching 
an army against the Varanos and Orsinis, who 
were defeated at Sigillo, and ruthlessly extermina- 
ting every person who dared question the lawful- 
ness of the succession ; while, all the time, Cardinal 
Robert, who had flung aside his priest’s garb and 
vows, went about in Rome, Tuscany, Venice — 
nay, even to the Emperor and the King of Spain, 
imploring help against the usurper. In a few 
months he had turned the tide of sympathy against 
the Duchess- Regent ; the Pope solemnly declared 
the investiture of Bartolommeo Orsini worthless, 
and published the accession of Robert II., Duke 
of Urbania and Count of Montemurlo ; the Grand 
Duke of Tuscany and the Venetians secretly pro- 
mised assistance, but only if Robert were able to 
assert his rights by main force. Little by little, 
one town after the other of the Duchy went over 
to Robert, and Medea da Carpi found herself sur- 
rounded in the mountain citadel of Urbania like a 


AMOUR DURE. 


i3 


scorpion surrounded by flames. (This simile is 
not mine, but belongs to Raflaello Gualterio, his- 
toriographer to Robert II.) But, unlike the scorpion, 
Medea refused to commit suicide. It is perfectly 
marvellous how, without money or allies, she could 
so long keep her enemies at bay ; and Gualterio 
attributes this to those fatal fascinations which had 
brought Pico and Stimigliano to their deaths, which 
had turned the once honest Guidalfonso into a 
villain, and which were such that, of all her lovers, 
not one but preferred dying for her, even after he 
had been treated with ingratitude and ousted by a 
rival ; a faculty which Messer Raflaello Gualterio 
clearly attributed to hellish connivance. 

At last the ex-Cardinal Robert succeeded, and 
triumphantly entered Urbania in November 1579. 
His accession was marked by moderation and 
clemency. Not a man was put to death, save 
Oliverotto da Narni, who threw himself on the new 
Duke, tried to stab him as he alighted at the 
palace, and who was cut down by the Duke's men, 
crying, “ Orsini, Orsini ! Medea, Medea ! Long 
live Duke Bartolommeo!” with his dying breath, 
although it is said that the Duchess had treated 
him with ignominy. The little Bartolommeo was 
sent to Rome to the Orsinis ; the Duchess, re- 
spectfully confined in the left wing of the palace. 

It is said that she haughtily requested to see the 
new Duke, but that he shook his head, and, in his 
priest's fashion, quoted a verse about Ulysses and 


14 


HA UN TINGS. 


the Sirens ; and it is remarkable that he persis- 
tently refused to see her, abruptly leaving his 
chamber one day that she had entered it by stealth. 
After a few months a conspiracy was discovered 
to murder Duke Robert, which had obviously been 
set on foot by Medea. But the young man, one 
Marcantonio Frangipani of Rome, denied, even 
under the severest torture, any complicity of hers ; 
so that Duke Robert, who wished to do nothing 
violent, merely transferred the Duchess from his 
villa at Sant’ Elmo to the convent of the Clarisse 
in town, where she was guarded and watched in 
the closest manner. It seemed impossible that 
Medea should intrigue any further, for she certainly 
saw and could be seen by no one. Yet she con- 
trived to send a letter and her portrait to one 
Prinzivalle degli Ordelaffi, a youth, only nineteen 
years old, of noble Romagnole family, and who 
was betrothed to one of the most beautiful girls of 
Urbania. He immediately broke off his engage- 
ment, and, shortly afterwards, attempted to shoot 
Duke Robert with a holster-pistol as he knelt at 
mass on the festival of Easter Day. This time 
Duke Robert was determined to obtain proofs 
against Medea. Prinzivalle degli Ordelaffi was 
kept some days without food, then submitted to 
the most violent tortures, and finally condemned. 
When he was going to be flayed with red-hot 
pincers and quartered by horses, he was told that 
he might obtain the grace of immediate death by 


AMOUR DURE. 


15 


confessing the complicity of the Duchess ; and the 
confessor and nuns of the convent, which stood in 
the place o£ execution outside Porta San Romano, 
pressed Medea to save the wretch, whose screams 
reached her, by confessing her own guilt. Medea 
asked permission to go to a balcony, where she 
could see Prinzivalle and be seen by him. She 
looked on coldly, then threw down her embroidered 
kerchief to the poor mangled creature. He asked 
the executioner to wipe his mouth with it, kissed 
it, and cried out that Medea was innocent. Then, 
after several hours of torments, he died. This 
was too much for the patience even of Duke 
Robert. Seeing that as long as Medea lived his 
life would be in perpetual danger, but unwilling to 
cause a scandal (somewhat of the priest-nature re- 
maining), he had Medea strangled in the convent, 
and, what is remarkable, insisted that only women 
— two infanticides to whqm he remitted their sen- 
tence — should be employed for the deed. 

“This clement prince/’ writes Don Arcangelo 
Zappi in his life of him, published in 1725, “can 
be blamed only for one act of cruelty, the more 
odious as he had himself, until released from his 
vows by the Pope, been in holy orders. It is said 
that when he caused the death of the infamous 
Medea da Carpi, his fear lest her extraordinary 
charms should seduce any man was such, that he 
not only employed women as executioners, but re- 
fused to permit her a priest or monk, thus forcing 


i6 


HA UNTINGS. 


her to die unshriven, and refusing her the benefit 
of any penitence that may have lurked in her 
adamantine heart.” 

Such is the story of Medea da Carpi, Duchess 
of Stimigliano Orsini, and then wife of Duke 
Guidalfonso II. of Urbania. She was put to death 
just two hundred and ninety-seven years ago, 
December 1582, at the age of barely seven-and 
twenty, and having, in the course of her short life, 
brought to a violent end five of her lovers, from 
Giovanfrancesco Pico to Prinzivalle degli Ordelaffi. 

Sept. 20th . — A grand illumination of the town 
in honour of the taking of Rome fifteen years ago. 
Except Sor Asdrubale, my landlord, who shakes 
his head at the Piedmontese, as he calls them, the 
people here are all Italianissimi. The Popes kept 
them very much down since Urbania lapsed to the 
Holy See in 1645. 

Sept. 2 Sih . — I have for some time been hunting 
for portraits of the Duchess Medea. Most of them, 
I imagine, must have been destroyed, perhaps by 
Duke Robert II.’s fear lest even after her death 
this terrible beauty should play him a trick. Three 
or four I have, however, been able to find — one a 
miniature in the Archives, said to be that which 
she sent to poor Prinzivalle degli Ordelaffi in order 
to turn his head ; one a marble bust in the palace 
lumber-room ; one in a large composition, possibly 
by Baroccio, representing Cleopatra at the feet of 
Augustus. Augustus is the idealised portrait of 


AMOUR DURE . 


i7 


Robert II., round cropped head, nose a little awry, 
clipped beard and scar as usual, but in Roman 
dress. Cleopatra seems to me, for all her Oriental 
dress, and although she wears a black wig, to be 
meant for Medea da Carpi ; she is kneeling, baring 
her breast for the victor to strike, but in reality to 
captivate him, and he turns away with an awkward 
gesture of loathing. None of these portraits seem 
very good, save the miniature, but that is an ex- 
quisite work, and with it, and the suggestions of 
the bust, it is easy to reconstruct the beauty of 
this terrible being. The type is that most admired 
by the late Renaissance, and, in some measure, 
immortalised by Jean Goujon and the French. 
The face is a perfect oval, the forehead somewhat 
over-round, with minute curls, like a fleece, of 
bright auburn hair ; the nose a trifle over-aquiline, 
and the cheek-bones a trifle too low ; the eyes 
grey, large, prominent, beneath exquisitely curved 
brows and lids just a little too tight at the corners ; 
the mouth also, brilliantly red and most delicately 
designed, is a little too tight, the lips strained a 
trifle over the teeth. Tight eyelids and tight lips 
give a strange refinement, and, at the same time, an 
air of mystery, a somewhat sinister seductiveness ; 
they seem to take, but not to give. The mouth 
with a kind of childish pout, looks as if it could 
bite or suck like a leech. The complexion is 
dazzlingly fair, the perfect transparent roset lily of 
a red-haired beauty ; the head, with hair elabo- 

B 


i8 


HA UN TINGS. 


rately curled and plaited close to it, and adorned 
with pearls, sits like that of the antique Arethusa 
on a long, supple, swan-like neck. A curious, at 
first rather conventional, artificial-looking sort of 
beauty, voluptuous yet cold, which, the more it is 
contemplated, the more it troubles and haunts the 
mind. Round the lady's neck is a gold chain with 
little gold lozenges at intervals, on which is en- 
graved the posy or pun (the fashioji of French 
devices is common in those days), “Amour Dure — 
Dure Amour." The same posy is inscribed in the 
hollow of the bust, and, thanks to it, I have been 
able to identify the latter as Medea's portrait. I 
often examine these tragic portraits, wondering 
what this face, which led so many men to their 
death, may have been like when it spoke or smiled, 
what at the moment when Medea da Carpi fasci- 
nated her victims into love unto death — “ Amour 
Dure — Dure Amour,” as runs her device — love that 
lasts, cruel love — yes indeed, when one thinks of 
the fidelity and fate of her lovers. 

Oct. 13th . — I have literally not had time to 
write a line of my diary all these days. My whole 
mornings have gone in those Archives, my after- 
noons taking long walks in this lovely autumn 
weather (the highest hills are just tipped with 
snow). My evenings go in writing that confounded 
account of the Palace of Urbania which Govern- 
ment requires, merely to keep me at work at some- 
thing useless. Of my history I have not yet been 


AMOUR DURE. 


9 


able to write a word. ... By the way, I must 
note down a curious circumstance mentioned in an 
anonymous MS. life of Duke Robert, which I fell 
upon to-day. When this prince had the equestrian 
statue of himself by Antonio Tassi, Gianbologna's 
pupil, erected in the square of the Corte , he secretly 
caused to be made, says my anonymous MS., a 
silver statuette of his familiar genius or angel — 
“ familiaris ejus angelus seu genius, quod a vulgo 
dicitur idolino ” — which statuette or idol, aftei 
having been consecrated by the astrologers — “ ab 
astrologis quibusdam ritibus sacrato ” — was placed 
in the cavity of the chest of the effigy by Tassi, 
in order, says the MS., that his soul might rest 
until the general Resurrection. This passage is 
curious, and to me somewhat puzzling ; how could 
the soul of Duke Robert await the general Resur- 
rection, when, as a Catholic, he ought to have be- 
lieved that it must, as soon as separated from his 
body, go to Purgatory ? Or is there some semi- 
pagan superstition of the Renaissance (most strange, 
certainly, in a man who had been a Cardinal) con- 
necting the soul with a guardian genius, who could 
be compelled, by magic rites (“ ab astrologis 
sacrato,” the MS. says, of the little idol), to remain 
fixed to earth, so that the soul should sleep in the 
body until the Day of Judgment? I confess this 
story baffles me. 1 wonder whether such an idol 
ever existed, or exists nowadays, in the body of 
Tassi’s bronze effigy ? 


20 


HA UNTINGS. 


Oct. 20th . — I have been seeing a good deal of 
late of the Vice-Prefect’s son : an amiable* young 
man with a love-sick face and a languid interest in 
Urbanian history and archaeology, of which he is 
profoundly ignorant. This young man, who has 
lived at Siena and Lucca before his father was 
promoted here, wears extremely long and tight 
trousers, which almost preclude his bending his 
knees, a stick-up collar and an eyeglass, and a pair 
of fresh kid gloves stuck in the breast of his coat, 
speaks of Urbania as Ovid might have spoken of 
Pontus, and complains (as well he may) of the 
barbarism of the young men, the officials who dine 
at my inn and howl and sing like madmen, and 
the nobles who drive gigs, showing almost as much 
throat as a lady at a ball. This person frequently 
entertains me with his amori , past, present, and 
future; he evidently thinks me very odd for having 
none to entertain him with in return ; he points 
out to me the pretty (or ugly) servant-girls and 
dressmakers as w r e walk in the street, sighs deeply 
or sings in falsetto behind every tolerably young- 
looking woman, and has finally taken me to the 
house of the lady of his heart, a great black- 
moustachioed countess, with a voice like a fish- 
crier ; here, he says, I shall meet all the best 
company in Urbania and some beautiful women- — 
ah, too beautiful, alas ! I find three huge half- 
furnished rooms, with bare brick floors, petroleum 
lamps, and horribly bad pictures on bright wash- 


AMOUR DURE . 


21 


ball-blue and gamboge walls, and in the midst of 
it all, every evening, a dozen ladies and gentlemen 
seated in a circle, vociferating at each other the 
same news a year old ; the younger ladies in bright 
yellows and greens, fanning themselves while my 
teeth chatter, and having sweet things whispered 
behind their fans by officers with hair brushed up 
like a hedgehog. And these are the women my 
friend expects me to fall in love with ! I vainly 
wait for tea or supper which does not come, and 
rush home, determined to leave alone the Urbanian 
beau monde. 

It is quite true that I have no amort , although 
my friend does not believe it. When I came to 
Italy first, I looked out for romance ; I sighed, 
like Goethe in Rome, for a window to open and 
a wondrous creature to appear, li welch mich 
versengend erquickt.” Perhaps it is because Goethe 
was a German, accustomed to German Fraus, and 
I am, after all, a Pole, accustomed to something 
very different from Fraus ; but anyhow, for all 
my efforts, in Rome, Florence, and Siena, I never 
could find a woman to go mad about, either among 
the ladies, chattering bad French, or among the 
lower classes, as ’cute and cold as money-lenders ; 
so I steer clear of Italian womankind, its shrill 
voice and gaudy toilettes. I am wedded to history, 
to the Past, to women like Lucrezia Borgia, Vittoria 
Accoramboni, or that Medea da Carpi, for the 
present ; some day I shall perhaps find a grand 


22 


HA UNTINGS. 


passion, a woman to play the Don Quixote about, 
like the Pole that I am ; a woman out of whose 
slipper to drink, and for whose pleasure to die ; 
but not here ! Few things strike me so much as 
the degeneracy of Italian women. What has be- 
come of the race of Faustinas, Marozias, Bianca 
Cappellos ? Where discover nowadays (I confess 
she haunts me) another Medea da Carpi ? Were 
it only possible to meet a woman of that extreme 
distinction of beauty, of that terribleness of nature, 
even if only potential, I do believe I could love her, 
even to the Day of Judgment, like any Oliverotto 
da Narni, or Frangipani or Prinzivalle. 

Oct. 2 yth . — Fine sentiments the above are for 
a professor, a learned man ! I thought the young 
artists of Rome childish because they played prac- 
tical jokes and yelled at night in the streets, re- 
turning from the Caffe Greco or the cellar in the 
Via Palombella ; but am I not as childish to the full 
— I, melancholy wretch, whom they called Hamlet 
and the Knight of the Doleful Countenance ? 

Nov. 5 th . — I can’t free myself from the thought 
of this Medea da Carpi. In my walks, my morn- 
ings in the Archives, my solitary evenings, I catch 
myself thinking over the woman. Am I turning 
novelist instead of historian ? And still it seems to 
me that I understand her so well ; so much better 
than my facts warrant. First, we must put aside 
all pedantic modern ideas of right and wrong. 
Right and wrong in a century of violence and 


AMOUR DURE. 


23 


treachery does not exist, least of all for creatures 
like Medea. Go preach right and wrong to a 
tigress, my dear sir ! Yet is there in the world 
anything nobler than the huge creature, steel when 
she springs, velvet when she treads, as she stretches 
her supple body, or smooths her beautiful skin, or 
fastens her strong claws into her victim ? 

Yes ; I can understand Medea. Fancy a woman 
of superlative beauty, of the highest courage and 
calmness, a woman of many resources, of genius, 
brought up by a petty princelet of a father, upon 
Tacitus and Sallust, and the tales of the great 
Malatestas, of Caesar Borgia and such-like ! — a 
woman whose one passion is conquest and empire 
— fancy her, on the eve of being w T edded to a man 
of the power of the Duke of Stimigliano, claimed, 
carried off by a small fry of a Pico, locked up in 
his hereditary brigand's castle, and having to re- 
ceive the young fool's red-hot love as an honour 
and a necessity ! The mere thought of any violence 
to such a nature is an abominable outrage ; and 
if Pico chooses to embrace such a woman at the 
risk of meeting a sharp piece of steel in her arms, 
why, it is a fair bargain. Young hound — or, if 
you prefer, young hero — to think to treat a woman 
like this as if she were any village wench ! Medea 
marries her Orsini. A marriage, let it be noted, 
between an old soldier of fifty and a girl of sixteen. 
Reflect what that means : it means that this im- 
perious woman is soon treated like a chattel, made 


24 


HA UNTINGS. 


roughly to understand that her business is to give 
the Duke an heir, not advice ; that she must never 
ask li wherefore this or that ? ” that she must 
courtesy before the Duke’s counsellors, his cap- 
tains, his mistresses ; that, at the least suspicion 
of rebelliousness, she is subject to his foul words 
and blows ; at the least suspicion of infidelity, to 
be strangled or starved to death, or thrown down an 
oubliette. Suppose that she know that her husband 
has taken it into his head that she has looked too 
hard at this man or that, that one of his lieutenants 
or one of his women have whispered that, after all, 
the boy Bartolommeo might as soon be a Pico as 
an Orsini. Suppose she know that she must strike 
or be struck ? Why, she strikes, or gets some 
one to strike for her. At what price ? A promise 
of love, of love to a groom, the son of a serf! 
Why, the dog must be mad or drunk to believe 
such a thing possible ; his very belief in anything 
so monstrous makes him worthy of death. And 
then he dares to blab ! This is much worse than 
Pico. Medea is bound to defend her honour a 
second time ; if she could stab Pico, she can cer- 
tainly stab this fellow, or have him stabbed. 

Hounded by her husband’s kinsmen, she takes 
refuge at Urbania. The Duke, like every other 
man, falls wildly in love with Medea, and neglects 
his wife ; let us even go so far as to say, breaks 
his wife’s heart. Is this Medea’s fault ? Is it 
her fault that every stone that comes beneath her 


AMOUR DURE. 


25 


chariot-wheels is crushed ? Certainly not. Do 
you suppose that a woman like Medea feels the 
smallest ill-will against a poor, craven Duchess 
Maddalena ? Why, she ignores her very existence. 
To suppose Medea a cruel woman is as grotesque 
as to call her an immoral woman. Her fate is, 
sooner or later, to triumph over her enemies, at 
all events to make their victory almost a defeat ; 
her magic faculty is to enslave all the men who 
come across her path ; all those who see her, love 
her, become her slaves ; and it is the destiny of all 
her slaves to perish. Her lovers, with the excep- 
tion of Duke Guidalfonso, all come to an untimely 
end ; and in this there is nothing unjust. The 
possession of a woman like Medea is a happiness 
too great for a mortal man ; it would turn his head, 
make him forget even what he owed her ; no man 
must survive long who conceives himself to have a 
right over her; it is a kind of sacrilege. And only 
death, the willingness to pay for such happiness 
by death, can at all make a man worthy of being 
her lover; he must be willing to love and suffer 
and die. This is the meaning of her device — 
li Amour Dure — Dure Amour." The love of Medea 
da Carpi cannot fade, but the lover can die ; it is 
a constant and a cruel love. 

Nov. nth . — I was right, quite right in my idea. 
I have found — Oh, joy ! I treated the Vice-Pre- 
fect's son to a dinner of five courses at the Trattoria 
La Stella d’ltalia out of sheer jubilation — I have 


26 


HA UNTINGS. 


found in the Archives, unknown, of course, to the 
Director, a heap of letters — letters of Duke Robert 
about Medea da Carpi, letters of Medea herself! 
Yes, Medea’s own handwriting — a round, scholarly 
character, full of abbreviations, with a Greek look 
about it, as befits a learned princess who could 
read Plato as well as Petrarch. The letters are 
of little importance, mere drafts of business letters 
for her secretary to copy, during the time that she 
governed the poor weak Guidalfonso. But they 
are her letters, and I can imagine almost that there 
hangs about these mouldering pieces of paper a 
scent as of a woman’s hair. 

The few letters of Duke Robert show him in a 
new light. A cunning, cold, but craven priest. He 
trembles at the bare thought of Medea — “ la pessima 
Medea ” — worse than her namesake of Colchis, as 
he calls her. His long clemency is a result of mere 
fear of laying violent hands upon her. He fears 
her as something almost supernatural ; he would 
have enjoyed having had her burnt as a witch. After 
letter on letter, telling his crony, Cardinal Sanse- 
verino, at Rome his various precautions during her 
lifetime — how he wears a jacket of mail under his 
coat ; how he drinks only milk from a cow which 
he has milked in his presence ; how he tries his 
dog with morsels of his food, lest it be poisoned ; 
how he suspects the wax-candles because of their 
peculiar smell ; how he fears riding out lest some 
one should frighten his horse and cause him to 


AMOUR DURE. 


27 


break his neck — after all this, and when Medea 
has been in her grave two years, he tells his cor- 
respondent of his fear of meeting the soul of Medea 
after his own death, and chuckles over the in- 
genious device (concocted by his astrologer and a 
certain Fra Gaudenzio, a Capuchin) by which he 
shall secure the absolute peace of his soul until 
that of the wicked Medea be finally u chained up 
in hell among the lakes of boiling pitch and the 
ice of Caina described by the immortal bard ” — old 
pedant ! Here, then, is the explanation of that 
silver image — quod vulgo dicitur idolino — which he 
caused to be soldered into his effigy by Tassi. As 
long as the image of his soul was attached to the 
image of his body, he should sleep awaiting the 
Day of Judgment, fully convinced that Medea’s soul 
will then be properly tarred and feathered, while 
his — honest man 1 — will fly straight to Paradise. 
And to think that, two weeks ago, I believed this 
man to be a hero ! Aha ! my good Duke Robert, 
you shall be shown up in my history ; and no 
amount of silver idolinos shall save you from being 
heartily laughed at ! 

Nov. \^th. — Strange ! That idiot of a Prefect's 
son, who has heard me talk a hundred times of 
Medea da Carpi, suddenly recollects that, when he 
was a child at Urbania, his nurse used to threaten 
him with a visit from Madonna Medea, who rode 
in the sky on a black he-goat. My Duchess Medea 
turned into a bogey for naughty little boys ! 


28 


HA UNTINGS. 


Nov. 20th . — L have been going about with a 
Bavarian Professor of mediaeval history, showing 
him all over the country. Among other places we 
went to Rocca Sant' Elmo, to see the former villa of 
the Dukes of Urbania, the villa where Medea was 
confined between the accession of Duke Robert 
and the conspiracy of Marcantonio Frangipani, 
which caused her removal to t4ie nunnery im- 
mediately outside the town. A long ride up the 
desolate Apennine valleys, bleak beyond words just 
now with their thin fringe of oak scrub turned 
russet, thin patches of grass sered by the frost, 
the last few yellow leaves of the poplars by the 
torrents shaking and fluttering about in the chill 
Tramontana; the mountain-tops are wrapped in 
thick grey cloud ; to-morrow, if the wind continues, 
we shall see them round masses of snow against 
the cold blue sky. Sant’ Elmo is a wretched hamlet 
high on the Apennine ridge, where the Italian 
vegetation is already replaced by that of the North. 
You ride for miles through leafless chestnut woods, 
the scent of the soaking brown leaves filling the 
air, the roar of the torrent, turbid with autumn 
rains, rising from the precipice below ; then 
suddenly the leafless chestnut woods are replaced, 
as at Vallombrosa, by a belt of black, dense fir 
plantations. Emerging from these, 3'ou come to 
an open space, frozen blasted meadows, the rocks 
of snow clad peak, the newly fallen snow, close 
above you ; and in the midst, on a knoll, with a 


AMOUR DURE . 


29 


gnarled larch on either side, the • ducal villa of 
Sant’ Elmo, a big black stone box with a stone 
escutcheon, grated windows, and a double flight of 
steps in front. It is now let out to the proprietor 
of the neighbouring woods, who uses it for the 
storage of chestnuts, faggots, and charcoal from the 
neighbouring ovens. We tied our horses to the 
iron rings and entered : an old woman, with dishe- 
velled .hair, was alone in the house. The villa 
is a mere hunting-lodge, built by Ottobuono IV., 
the father of Dukes Guidalfonso and Robert, about 
1530. Some of the rooms have at one time been 
frescoed and panelled with oak carvings, but all 
this has disappeared. Only, in one of the big 
rooms, there remains a large marble fireplace, 
similar to those in the palace at Urbania, beauti- 
fully carved with Cupids on a blue ground ; a 
charming naked boy sustains a jar on either side, 
one containing clove pinks, the other roses. The 
room was filled with stacks of faggots. 

We returned home late, my companion in ex- 
cessively bad humour at the fruitlessness of the 
expedition. We were caught in the skirt of a 
snowstorm as we got into the chestnut woods. 
The sight of the snow falling gently, of the earth 
and bushes whitened all round, made me feel back 
at Posen, once more a child. I sang and shouted, 
to my companion’s horror. This will be a bad 
point against me if reported at Berlin. A historian 
of twenty-four who shouts and sings, and that 


30 


HA UNTINGS. 


when another historian is cursing at the snow and 
the bad roads ! All night I lay awake watching 
the embers of my wood fire, and thinking of Medea 
da Carpi mewed up, in winter, in that solitude of 
Sant’ Elmo, the firs groaning, the torrent roaring, 
the snow falling all round ; miles and miles away 
from human creatures. I fancied I saw it all, 
and that I, somehow, was Marcantonio Frangipani 
come to liberate her — or Was it Prinzivalle degli 
Ordelaffi ? I suppose it was because of the long 
ride, the unaccustomed pricking feeling of the 
snow in the air ; or perhaps the punch which my 
professor insisted on drinking after dinner. 

Nov. 2 $rd . — Thank goodness, that Bavarian 
professor has finally departed ! Those days he 
spent here drove me nearly crazy. Talking over 
my work, I told him one day my views on Medea 
da Carpi ; whereupon he condescended to answer 
that those were the usual tales due to the mytho- 
poeic (old idiot ! ) tendency of the Renaissance ; 
that research would disprove the greater part of 
them, as it had disproved the stories current 
about the Borgias, &c. ; that, moreover, such a 
woman as I made out was psychologically and 
physiologically impossible. Would that one could 
say as much of such professors as he and his 
fellows ! 

Nov. 24 th . — I cannot get over my pleasure in 
being rid of that imbecile ; I felt as if I could have 
throttled him every time he snoke of the Lady of 


AMOUR DURE. 


3 


my thoughts — for such she has become — Metea, 
as the animal called her ! 

Nov. 30 th . — I feel quite shaken at what has 
just happened ; I am beginning to fear that that old 
pedant was right in saying that it was bad for me 
to live all alone in a strange country, that it would 
make me morbid. It is ridiculous that I should 
be put into such a state of excitement merely by the 
chance discovery of a portrait of a woman dead 
these three hundred years. With the case of my 
uncle Ladislas, and other suspicions of insanity in 
my family, I ought really to guard against such 
foolish excitement. 

Yet the incident was really dramatic, uncanny. 
I could have sworn that I knew every picture in 
the palace here ; and particularly every picture of 
Her. Anyhow, this morning, as I was leaving the 
Archives, I passed through one of the many small 
rooms — irregular-shaped closets — which fiir up the 
ins and outs of this curious palace, turreted like a 
French chateau. I must have passed through that 
closet before, for the view was so familiar out of 
its window ; just the particular bit of round tower 
in front, the cypress on the other side of the ravine, 
the belfry beyond, and the piece of the line of 
Monte Sant’ Agata and the Leonessa, covered with 
snow, against the sky. I suppose there must be 
twin rooms, and that I had got into the wrong one ; 
or rather, perhaps some shutter had been opened or 
curtain withdrawn. As I was passing, my eye wag 


32 


HA UNTINGS. 


caught by a very beautiful old mirror-frame let 
into the brown and yellow inlaid wall. I ap- 
proached, and looking at the frame, looked also, 
mechanically, into the glass. I gave a great start, 
and almost shrieked, I do believe — (it's lucky the 
Munich professor is safe out of Urbania!). Be- 
hind my own image stood another, a figure close 
to my shoulder, a face close to mine ; and that 
figure, that face, hers ! Medea da Carpi’s ! I 
turned sharp round, as white, I think, as the ghost 
I expected to see. On the wall opposite the 
mirror, just a pace or two behind where I had 
been standing, hung a portrait. And such a por- 
trait ! — Bronzino never painted a grander one. 
Against a background of harsh, dark blue, there 
stands out the figure of the Duchess (for it is Medea, 
the real Medea, a thousand times more real, indi- 
vidual, and powerful than in the other portraits), 
seated stiffly in a high-backed chair, sustained, as 
it were, almost rigid, by the stiff brocade of skirts 
and stomacher, stiffer for plaques of embroidered 
silver flowers and rows of seed pearl. The dress 
is, with its mixture of silver and pearl, of a strange 
dull red, a wicked poppy -juice colour, against which 
the flesh of the long, narrow hands with fringe-like 
fingers ; of the long slender neck, and the face 
with bared forehead, looks white and hard, like 
alabaster. The face is the same as in the other 
portraits : the same rounded forehead, with the 
short fleece-like, yellowish-red curls ; the same 


AMOUR DURE. 


33 


beautifully curved eyebrows, just barely marked ; 
the same eyelids, a little tight across the eyes ; 
the same lips, a little tight across the mouth ; but 
with a purity of line, a dazzling splendour of skin, 
and intensity of look immeasurably superior to all 
the other portraits. 

She looks out of the frame with a cold, level 
glance ; yet the lips smile. One hand holds a dull- 
red rose ; the other, long, narrow, tapering, plays 
with a thick rope of silk and gold and jewels 
hanging from the waist ; round the throat, white 
as marble, partially confined in the tight dull- 
red bodice, hangs a gold collar, with the device 
on alternate enamelled medallions, “ Amour Dure 
— Dure Amour.” 

On reflection, I see that I simply could never 
have been in that room or closet before ; I must 
have mistaken the door. But, although the ex- 
planation is so simple, I still, after several hours, 
feel terribly shaken in all my being. If I grow so 
excitable I shall have to go to Rome at Christmas 
for a holiday. I feel • as if some danger pursued 
me here (can it be fever ?) ; and yet, and yet, I 
don’t see how I shall ever tear myself away. 

Dec. loth . — I have made an effort, and accepted 
the Vice- Prefect’s son’s invitation to see. the oil- 
making at a villa of theirs near the coast. The 
villa, or farm, is an old fortified, towered place, 
standing on a hillside among olive-trees and little 
osier-bushes, which look like a bright orange 

c 


34 


HA UNTINGS . 


flame. The olives are squeezed in a tremendous 
black cellar, like a prison : you see, by the faint 
white daylight, and the smoky yellow flare of resin 
burning in pans, great white bullocks moving 
round a huge millstone ; vague figures working at 
pulleys and handles : it looks, to my fancy, like 
some scene of the Inquisition. The Cavaliere 
regaled me with his best wine and rusks. I 
took some long walks by the seaside ; I had left 
Urbania wrapped in snow-clouds ; down on the 
coast there was a bright sun ; the sunshine, the 
sea, the bustle of the little port on the Adriatic 
seemed to do me good. I came back to Urbania 
another man. Sor Asdrubale, my landlord, poking 
about in slippers among the gilded chests, the 
Empire sofas, the old cups and saucers and pictures 
which no one will buy, congratulated me upon the 
improvement in my looks. “You work too much,” 
he says; “youth requires amusement, theatres, 
promenades, amort — it is time enough to be serious 
when one is bald ” — and he took off his greasy red 
cap. Yes, I am better ! and, as a result, I take to 
my work with delight again. I will cut them out 
still, those wiseacres at Berlin ! 

Dec. 14th . — I don’t think I have ever felt so 
happy about my work. I see it all so well — that 
crafty, cowardly Duke Robert ; that melancholy 
Duchess Maddalena ; that weak, showy, would-be 
chivalrous Duke Guidalfonso ; and above all, the 
splendid figure of Medea. I feel as if I were the 


AMOUR DURE. 


35 


greatest historian of the age ; and, at the same 
time, as if I were a boy of twelve. It snowed 
yesterday for the first time in the city, for two 
good hours. When it had done, I actually went 
into the square and taught the ragamuffins to 
make a snow-man ; no, a snow-woman ; and I 
had the fancy to call her Medea. “ La pessima 
Medea ! " cried one of the boys — “ the one who 
used to ride through the air on a goat ? " “ No, 

no," I said ; “ she was a beautiful lady, the 
Duchess of Urbania, the most beautiful woman 
that ever lived." I made her a crown of tinsel, 
and taught the boys to cry “ Evviva, Medea ! " 
But one of them said, " She is a witch ! She 
must be burnt ! " At which they all rushed to 
fetch burning faggots and tow; in a minute the 
yelling demons had melted her down. 

Dec. \^th . — What a goose I am, and to think I 
am twenty-four, and known in literature ! In my 
long walks I have composed to a tune (I don’t 
know what it is) which all the people are singing 
and whistling in the street at present, a poem 
in frightful Italian, beginning “ Medea, mia dea," 
calling on her in the name of her various lovers. 
I go about humming between my teeth, “ Why 
am I not Marcantonio ? or Prinzivalle ? or he of 
Narni ? or the good Duke Alfonso ? that I might 
be beloved by thee, Medea, mia dea," &c. &c. 
Awful rubbish ! My landlord, I think, suspects 
that Medea must be some lady I met while I was 


3 6 


HA UNTINGS. 


staying by the seaside. I am sure Sora Sera- 
fina, Sora Lodovica, and Sora Adalgisa — the three 
Parcse or Norns , as I call them — have some such 
notion. This afternoon, at dusk, while tidying my 
room, Sora Lodovica said to me, “ How beauti- 
fully the Signorino has taken to singing ! ” I 
was scarcely aware that I had been vociferating, 
“ Vieni, Medea, mia dea,” while thfe old lady 
bobbed about making up my fire. I stopped ; a 
nice reputation I shall get 1 I thought, and all this 
will somehow get to Rome, and thence to Berlin. 
Sora Lodovica was leaning out of the window, 
pulling in the iron hook of the shrine-lamp which 
marks Sor Asdrubale’s house. As she was trim- 
ming the lamp previous to swinging it out again, 
she said in her odd, prudish little way, “ You are 
wrong to stop singing, my son ” (she varies between 
calling me Signor Professore and such terms of 
affection as “ Nino,” “ Viscere mie,” &c.) ; “ you 
are wrong to stop singing, for there is a young 
lady there in the street who has actually stopped 
to listen to you.” 

I ran to the window. A woman, wrapped in a 
black shawl, was standing in an archway, looking 
up to the window. 

“ Eh, eh ! the Signor Professore has admirers,” 
said Sora Lodovica. 

u Medea, mia dea ! ” I burst out as loud as I 
could, with a boy’s pleasure in disconcerting the 
inquisitive passer-by. She turned suddenly round 


AMOUR DURE. 


37 


lo go away, waving her hand at me ; at that 
moment Sora Lodovica swung the shrine-lamp 
back into its place. A stream of light fell across 
the street. I felt myself grow quite cold ; the 
face of the woman outside was that of Medea 
da Carpi ! 

What a fool I am, to be sure ! 


PART II. 


Dec. i yth . — I fear that my craze about Medea da 
Carpi has become well known, thanks to my silly 
talk and idiotic songs. That Vice-Prefect’s son — 
or the assistant at the Archives, or perhaps some 
of the company at the Contessa’s, is trying to play 
me a trick ! But take care, my good ladies and 
gentlemen, I shall pay you out in your own coin ! 
Imagine my feelings when, this morning, I found 
on my desk a folded letter addressed to me in 
a curious handwriting which seemed strangely 
familiar to me, and which, after a - moment, 1 re- 
cognised as that of the letters of Medea da Carpi 
at the Archives. It gave me a horrible shock. 
My next idea was that it must be a present from 
some one who knew my interest in Medea — a 
genuine letter of hers on which some idiot had 
written my address instead of putting it into an 
envelope. But it was addressed to me, written to 
me, no old letter ; merely four lines, which ran as 
follows : — 

To Spiridion. — A person who knows the 

interest you bear her will be at the Church of 
38 


AMOUR DURE. 


39 


San Giovanni Decollate this evening at nine. 
Look out, in the left aisle, for a lady wearing a 
black mantle, and holding a rose.” 

By this time I understood that I was the object 
of a conspiracy, the victim of a hoax. I turned 
the letter round and round. It was written on 
paper such as was made in the sixteenth century, 
and in an extraordinarily precise imitation of Medea 
da Carpi’s characters. Who had written it ? I 
thought over all the possible people. On the whole, 
it must be the Vice-Prefect’s son, perhaps in com- 
bination with his lady-love, the Countess. They 
must have torn a blank page off some old letter; 
but that either of them should have had the in- 
genuity of inventing such a hoax, or the power of 
committing such a forgery, astounds me beyond 
measure. There is more in these people than I 
should have guessed. How pay them off? By 
taking no notice of the letter ? Dignified, but dull. 
No, I will go ; perhaps some one will be there, and 
I will mystify them in their turn. Or, if no one is 
there, how I shall crow over them for their im- 
perfectly carried out plot ! Perhaps this is some 
folly of the Cavalier Muzio’s to bring me into the 
presence of some lady whom he destines to be the 
flame of my future amort. That is likely enough. 
And it would be too idiotic and professorial to 
refuse such an invitation ; the lady must be worth 
knowing who can forge sixteenth-century letters 


40 


HA UN TINGS. 


like this, for I am sure that languid swell Muzio 
never could. I will go ! By Heaven ! I’ll pay 
them back in their own coin ! It is now five — how 
long these days are ! 

Dec. 1 8 th . — Am I mad? Or are there really 
ghosts ? That adventure of last night has shaken 
me to the very depth of my soul. 

I went at nine, as the mysterious letter had bid 
me. It was bitterly cold, and the air full of fog 
and sleet ; not a shop open, not a window un- 
shuttered, not a creature visible ; the narrow black 
streets, precipitous between their high walls and 
under their lofty archways, were only the blacker 
for the dull light of an oil-lamp here and there, 
with its flickering yellow reflection on the wet 
flags. San Giovanni Decollato is a little church, 
or rather oratory, which I have always hitherto 
seen shut up (as so many churches here are shut 
up except on great festivals) ; and situate behind 
the ducal palace, on a sharp ascent, and forming 
the bifurcation of two steep paved lanes. I have 
passed by the place a hundred times, and scarcely 
noticed the little church, except for the marble 
high relief over the door, showing the grizzly head 
of the Baptist in the charger, and for the iron 
cage close by, in which were formerly exposed 
the heads of criminals ; the decapitated, or, as they 
call him here, decollated, John the Baptist, being 
apparently the patron of axe and block. 

A few strides took me from my lodgings to San 


AMOUR DURE. 


4i 


Giovanni Decollato. I confess I was excited ; one 
is not twenty-four and a Pole for nothing. On 
getting to the kind of little platform at the bifurca- 
tion of the two precipitous streets, I found, to my 
surprise, that the windows of the church or oratory 
were not lighted, and that the door was locked ! 
So this was the precious joke that had been played 
upon me ; to send me on a bitter cold, sleety 
night, to a church which was shut up and had 
perhaps been shut up for years ! I don’t know 
what I couldn’t have done in that moment of rage ; 
I felt inclined to break open the church door, or to 
go and pull the Vice- Prefect’s son out of bed (for 
I felt sure that the joke was his). I determined 
upon the latter course ; and was walking towards 
his door, along the black alley to the left of the 
church, when I was suddenly stopped by the 
sound as of an organ close by ; an organ, yes, 
quite plainly, and the voice of choristers and the 
drone of a litany. So the church was not shut, 
after all ! I retraced my steps to the top of the 
lane. All was dark and in complete silence. 
Suddenly there came again a faint gust of organ 
and voices. I listened ; it clearly came from the 
other lane, the one on the right-hand side. Was 
there, perhaps, another door there ? I passed 
beneath the archway, and descended a little way 
in the direction whence the sounds seemed to 
come. But no door, no light, only the black walls, 
the black wet flags, with their faint yellow reflec- 


42 


HA UNTINGS. 


tions of flickering oil-lamps ; moreover, complete 
silence. I stopped a minute, and then the chant 
rose again ; this time it seemed to me most 
certainly from the lane I had just left. I went 
back — nothing. Thus backwards and forwards, 
the sounds always beckoning, as it were, one way, 
only to beckon me back, vainly, to the other. 

At last I lost patience ; and I felt a sort of 
creeping terror, which only a violent action could 
dispel. If the mysterious sounds came neither 
from the street to the right, nor from the street to 
the left, they could come only from the church. 
Half-maddened, I rushed up the two or three steps, 
and prepared to wrench the door open with a 
tremendous effort. To my amazement, it opened 
with the greatest ease. I entered, and the sounds 
of the litany met me louder than before, as I 
paused a moment between the outer door and the 
heavy leathern curtain. I raised the latter and 
crept in. The altar was brilliantly illuminated 
with tapers and garlands of chandeliers ; this was 
evidently some evening service connected with 
Christmas. The nave and aisles were compara- 
tively dark, and about half-full. I elbowed my 
way along the right aisle towards the altar. When 
my eyes had got accustomed to the unexpected 
light, I began to look round me, and with a beat- 
ing heart. The idea that all this was a hoax, that 
I should meet merely some acquaintance of my 
friend the Cavaliere's, had somehow departed : I 


AMOUR DURE. 


43 


looked about. The people were all wrapped up, 
the men in big cloaks, the women in woollen veils 
and mantles. The body of the church was com- 
paratively dark, and I could not make out anything 
very clearly, but it seemed to me, somehow, as if, 
under the cloaks and veils, these people were dressed 
in a rather extraordinary fashion. The man in 
front of me, I remarked, showed yellow stockings 
beneath his cloak ; a woman, hard by, a red 
bodice, laced behind with gold tags. Could these 
be peasants from some remote part come for the 
Christmas festivities, or did the inhabitants of 
Urbania don some old-fashioned garb in honour 
of Christmas ? 

As I was wondering, my eye suddenly caught 
that of a woman standing in the opposite aisle, 
close to the altar, and in the full blaze of its 
lights. She was wrapped in black, but held, in 
a very conspicuous way, a red rose, an unknown 
luxury at this time of the year in a place like 
Urbania. She evidently saw me, and turning even 
more fully into the light, she loosened her heavy 
black cloak, displaying a dress of deep red, with 
gleams of silver and gold embroideries ; she turned 
her face towards me; the full blaze of the chan- 
deliers and tapers fell upon it. It was the face 
of Medea da Carpi ! I dashed across the nave, 
pushing people roughly aside, or rather, it seemed 
to me, passing through impalpable bodies. But 
the lady turned and walked rapidly down the aisle 


44 


HAUNTINGS . 


towards the door. I followed close upon her, but 
somehow I could not get up with her. Once, at 
the curtain, she turned round again. She was 
within a few paces of me. Yes, it was Medea. 
Medea herself, no mistake, no delusion, no sham ; 
the oval face, the lips tightened over the mouth, 
the eyelids tight over the corner of the eyes, the 
exquisite alabaster complexion ! She raised the 
curtain and glided out. I followed ; the curtain 
alone separated me from her. I saw the wooden 
door swing to behind her. One step ahead of me ! 
I tore open the door ; she must be on the steps, 
within reach of my arm ! 

I stood outside the church. All was empty, 
merely the wet pavement and the yellow reflections 
in the pools : a sudden cold seized me ; I could 
not go on. I tried to re-enter the church ; it was 
shut. I rushed home, my hair standing on end, 
and trembling in all my limbs, and remained for an 
hour like a maniac. Is it a delusion ? Am I too 
going mad ? O God, God ! am I going mad ? 

Dec. 19 th . — A brilliant, sunny day ; all the black 
snow-slush has disappeared out of the town, off 
the bushes and trees. The snow-clad mountains 
sparkle against the bright blue sky. A Sunday, 
and Sunday weather ; all the bells are ringing for 
the approach of Christmas. They are preparing 
for a kind of fair in the square with the colonnade, 
putting up booths filled with coloured cotton and 
woollen ware, bright shawls and kerchiefs, mirrors 


AMOUR DURE . 


45 


ribbons, brilliant pewter lamps ; the whole turn- 
out of the pedlar in “ Winter's Tale.” The pork- 
shops are all garlanded with green and with paper 
flowers, the hams and cheeses stuck full of little 
flags and green twigs. I strolled out to see the 
cattle-fair outside the gate ; a forest of interlacing 
horns, an ocean of lowing and stamping : hundreds 
of immense white bullocks, with horns a yard long 
and red tassels, packed close together on the little 
piazza d’armi under the city walls. Bah ! why do 
I write this trash ? What's the use of it all ? 
While I am forcing myself to write about bells, 
and Christmas festivities, and cattle-fairs, one idea 
goes on like a bell within me : Medea, Medea ! 
Have I really seen her, or am I mad ? 

Two hours later . — That Church of San Giovanni 
Decollato — so my landlord informs me — has not 
been made use of within the memory of man. 
Could it have been all a hallucination or a dream 
— perhaps a dream dreamed that night ? I have 
been out again to look at that church. There it 
is, at the bifurcation of the two steep lanes, with 
its bas-relief of the Baptist’s head over the door. 
The door does look as if it had not been opened 
for years. I can see the cobwebs in the window- 
panes ; it does look as if, as Sor Asdrubale says, 
only rats and spiders congregated within it. And 
yet — and yet; I have so clear a remembrance, so 
distinct a consciousness of it all. There was a 
picture of the daughter of Herodias dancing, upon 


46 


HA UN TINGS. 


the altar ; I remember her white turban with a 
scarlet tuft of feathers, and Herod’s blue caftan ; 
I remember the shape of the central chandelier ; it 
swung round slowly, and one of the wax lights had 
got bent almost in two by the heat and draught. 

Things, all these, which I may have seen else- 
where, stored unawares in my brain, and which 
may have come out, somehow, in a dream ; I have 
heard physiologists allude to such things. I will 
go again : if the church be shut, why then it must 
have been a dream, a vision, the result of over- 
excitement. I must leave at once for Rome and 
see doctors, for I am afraid of going mad. If, on 
the other hand — pshaw ! there is no other hand 
in such a case. Yet if there were — why then, I 
should really have seen Medea; I might see her 
again ; speak to her. The mere thought sets my 
blood in a whirl, not with horror, but with . . . 
I know not what to call it. The feeling terrifies 
me, but it is delicious. Idiot ! There is some 
little coil of my brain, the twentieth of a hair’s- 
breadth out of order — that’s all ! 

Dec. 20th. — I have been again ; I have heard the 
music ; I have been inside the church ; I have seen 
Her ! I can no longer doubt my senses. Why 
should I ? Those pedants say that the dead are 
dead, the past is past. For them, yes ; but why 
for me ? — why for a man who loves, who is con- 
sumed with the love of a woman ? — a woman who, 
indeed — yes, let me finish the sentence. Why 


AMOUR DURE. 


47 


should there not be ghosts to such as can see 
them ? Why should she not return to the earth, 
if she knows that it contains a man who thinks of, 
desires, only her ? 

A hallucination ? Why, I saw her, as I see 
this paper that I write upon ; standing there, in 
the full blaze of the altar. Why, I heard the rustle 
of her skirts, I smelt the scent of her hair, I raised 
the curtain which was shaking from her touch. 
Again I missed her. But this time, as I rushed 
out into the empty moonlit street, I found upon 
the church steps a rose — the rose which I had 
seen in her haild the moment before — I felt it, 
smelt it ; a rose, a real, living rose, dark red and 
only just plucked. I put it into water when I 
returned, after having kissed it, who knows how 
many times ? I placed it on the top of the cup- 
board ; I determined not to look at it for twenty- 
four hours lest it should be a delusion. But I 
must see it again ; I must. . . . Good Heavens ! 
this is horrible, horrible ; if I had found a skeleton 
it could not have been worse ! The rose, which 
last night seemed freshly plucked, full of colour 
and perfume, is brown, dry — a thing kept for 
centuries between the leaves of a book — it has 
crumbled into dust between my fingers. Horrible, 
horrible ! But why so, pray ? Did I not know 
that I was in love with a woman dead three 
hundred years ? If I wanted fresh roses which 
bloomed yesterday, the Countess Fiammetta or 


4 8 


HA UNTINGS. 


any little sempstress in Urbania might have given 
them me. What if the rose has fallen to dust ? 
If only I could hold Medea in my arms as I held 
it in my fingers, kiss her lips as I kissed its petals, 
should I not be satisfied if she too were to fall 
to dust the next moment, if I were to fall to dust 
myself? 

Dec. 22 nd, Eleven at night . — I have seen her once 
more ! — almost spoken to her. I have been pro- 
mised her love ! Ah, Spiridion ! you were right 
when you felt that you were not made for any 
earthly amori. At the usual hour I betook myself 
this evening to San Giovanni Deeollato. A bright 
winter night ; the high houses and belfries standing 
out against a deep blue heaven luminous, shimmer- 
ing like steel with myriads of stars ; the moon has 
not yet risen. There was no light in the windows ; 
but, after a little effort, the door opened and I 
entered the church, the altar, as usual, brilliantly 
illuminated. It struck me suddenly that all this 
crowd of men and women standing all round, these 
priests chanting and moving about the altar, were 
dead — that they did not exist for any man save 
me. I touched, as if by accident, the hand of my 
neighbour ; it was cold, like wet clay. He turned 
round, but did not seem to see me : his face was 
ashy, and his eyes staring, fixed, like those of a 
blind man or a corpse. I felt as if I must rush 
out. But at that moment my eye fell upon Her, 
standing as usual by the altar steps, wrapped in a 


AMOUR DURE. 


49 


black mantle, in the full blaze of the lights. She 
turned round ; the light fell straight upon her face, 
the face with the delicate features, the eyelids and 
lips a little tight, the alabaster skin faintly tinged 
with pale pink. Our eyes met. 

I pushed my way across the nave towards where 
she stood by the altar steps ; she turned quickly 
down the aisle, and I after her. Once or twice 
she lingered, and I thought 1 should overtake her ; 
but again, when, not a second after the door had 
closed upon her, I stepped out into the street, she 
had vanished. On the church step lay something 
white. It was not a flower this time, but a letter. 
I rushed back to the church to read it ; but the 
church was fast shut, as if it had not been opened 
for years. I could not see by the flickering shrine- 
lamps — I rushed home, lit my lamp, pulled the 
letter from my breast. I have it before me. The 
handwriting is hers ; the same as in the Archives, 
the same as in that first letter : — 

“ To Spiridion. — Let thy courage be equal to 
thy love, and thy love shall be rewarded. On the 
night preceding Christmas, take a hatchet and saw ; 
cut boldly into the body of the bronze rider who 
stands in the Corte, on the left side, near the waist. 
Saw open the body, and within it thou wilt find the 
silver effigy of a winged genius. Take it out, hack 
it into a hundred pieces, and fling them in all direc- 
tions, so that the winds may sweep them away. 

D 


5 ° 


HA UNTINGS. 


That night she whom thou lovest will come to re- 
ward thy fidelity.” 

On the brownish wax is the device — 

“ Amour Dure — Dure Amour.” 

Dec. 23 rd . — So it is true ! I was reserved for 
something wonderful in this world. I have at last 
found that after which my soul has been straining. 
Ambition, love of art, love of Italy, these things 
which have occupied my spirit, and have yet left 
me continually unsatisfied, these were none of 
them my real destiny. I have sought for life, 
thirsting for it as a man in the desert thirsts 
for a well ; but the life of the senses of other 
youths, the life of the intellect of other men, have 
never slaked that thirst. Shall life for me mean 
the love of a dead woman ? We smile at what we 
choose to call the superstition of the past, forget- 
ting that all our vaunted science of to-day may seem 
just such another superstition to the men of the 
future ; but why should the present be right and 
the past wrong ? The men who painted the pic- 
tures and built the palaces of three hundred years 
ago were certainly of as delicate fibre, of as 
keen reason, as ourselves, who merely print calico 
and build locomotives. What makes me think this, 
is that I have been calculating my nativity by help 
of an old book belonging to Sor Asdrubale — and 
see, my horoscope tallies almost exactly with that 


AMOUR DURE. 


5 1 


of Medea da Carpi, as given by a chronicler. May 
this explain ? No, no ; all is explained by the fact 
that the first time I read of this woman’s career, 
the first time I saw her portrait, I loved her, 
though I hid my love to myself in the garb of 
historical interest. Historical interest indeed ! 

I have got the hatchet and the saw. I bought 
the saw of a poor joiner, in a village some miles 
off ; he did not understand at first what I meant, 
and I think he thought me mad ; perhaps I am. 
But if madness means the happiness of one’s life, 
what of it ? The hatchet I saw lying in a timber- 
yard, where they prepare the great trunks of the 
fir-trees which grow high on the Apennines of 
Sant’ Elmo. There was no one in the yard, and 
I could not resist the temptation ; I handled the 
thing, tried its edge, and stole it. This is the first 
time in my life that I have been a thief ; why did 
I not go into a shop and buy a hatchet ? I don’t 
know ; I seemed unable to resist the sight of the 
shining blade. What I am going to do is, I sup- 
pose, an act of vandalism ; and certainly I have 
no right to spoil the property of this city of Ur- 
bania. But I wish no harm either to the statue 
or the city ; if I could plaster up the bronze, I 
would do so willingly. But I must obey Her ; I 
must avenge Her; I must get at that silver image 
which Robert of Montemurlo had made and con- 
secrated in order that his cowardly soul might 
sleep in peace, and not encounter that of the being 


HA UNTINGS. 


52 

whom he dreaded most in the world. Aha ! Duke 
Robert, you forced her to die unshriven, and you 
stuck the image of your soul into the image of 
your body, thinking thereby that, while she suffered 
the tortures of Hell, you would rest in peace, until 
your well-scoured little soul might fly straight up 
to Paradise ; — you were afraid of Her when both 
of you should be dead, and thought yourself very 
clever to have prepared for all emergencies ! Not 
so, Serene Highness. You too shall taste what it 
is to wander after death, and to meet the dead 
whom one has injured. 

What an interminable day ! But I shall see her 
again to-night. 

Eleven o’clock . — No ; the church was fast closed ; 
the spell had ceased. Until to-morrow I shall not 
see her. But to-morrow ! Ah, Medea ! did any of 
thy lovers love thee as I do ? 

Twenty-four hours more till the moment of happi- • 
ness — the moment for which I seem to have been 
waiting all my life. And after that, what next ? 
Yes, I see it plainer every minute ; after that, nothing 
more. All those who loved Medea da Carpi, who 
loved and who served her, died : Giovanfrancesco 
Pico, her first husband, whom she left stabbed in 
the castle from which she fled ; Stimigliano, who 
died of poison ; the groom who gave him the 
poison, cut down by her orders ; Oliverotto da 
Narni, Marcantonio Frangipani, and that poor boy 
.of the Ordelaffi, who had never even looked upon 


AMOUR DURE. 


53 


her face, and whose only reward was that hand- 
kerchief with which the hangman wiped the sweat 
off his face, when he was one mass of broken limbs 
and torn flesh : all had to die, and I shall die also. 

The love of such a woman is enough, and is 
fatal — “ Amour Dure," as her device says. I shall 
die also. But why not ? Would it be possible to 
live in order to love another woman ? Nay, would 
it be possible to drag on a life like this one after 
the happiness of to-morrow? Impossible; the 
others died, and I must die. I always felt that I 
should not live long ; a gipsy in Poland told me 
once that I had in my hand the cut-line which 
signifies a violent death. I might have ended in 
a duel with some brother-student, or in a railway 
accident. No, no ; my death will not be of that 
sort ! Death — and is not she also dead ? What 
strange vistas does such a thought not open ! 
Then the others — Pico, the Groom, Stimigliano, 
Oliverotto, Frangipani, Prinzivalle degli Ordelaffi 
— will they all be there ? But she shall love me 
best — me by whom she has been loved after she 
has been three hundred years in the grave ! 

Dec. 24 th . — I have made all my arrangements. 
To-night at eleven I slip out ; Sor Asdrubale and 
his sisters will be sound asleep. I have questioned 
them ; their fear of rheumatism prevents their 
attending midnight mass. Luckily there are no 
churches between this and the Corte ; whatever 
movement Christmas night may entail will be a good 


54 


HA UN TINGS. 


way off. The Vice-Prefect’s rooms are on the other 
side of the palace ; the rest of the square is taken 
up with state-rooms, archives, and empty stables 
and coach-houses of the palace. Besides, I shall 
be quick at my work. 

I have tried my saw on a stout bronze vase I 
bought of Sor Asdrubale ; and the bronze of the 
statue, hollow and worn away by rust (I have 
even noticed holes), cannot resist very much, 
especially after a blow with the sharp hatchet. 
I have put my papers in order, for the benefit of 
the Government which has sent me hither. I am 
sorry to have defrauded them of their “ History 
of Urbania.” To pass the endless day and calm 
the fever of impatience, I have just taken a long 
walk. This is the coldest day we have had. 
The bright sun does not warm in the least, but 
seems only to increase the impression of cold, to 
make the snow on the mountains glitter, the blue 
air to sparkle like steel. The few people who are 
out are muffled to the nose, and carry earthenware 
braziers beneath their cloaks ; long icicles hang 
from the fountain with the figure of Mercury upon 
it ; one can imagine the wolves trooping down 
through the dry scrub and beleaguering this town. 
Somehow this cold makes me feel wonderfully calm 
— it seems to bring back to me my boyhood. 

As I walked up the rough, steep, paved alleys, 
slippery with frost, and with their vista of snow 
mountains against the sky, and passed by the church 


AMOUR DURE. 


55 

steps strewn with box and laurel, with the faint 
smell of incense coming out, there returned to me — 
I know not why — the recollection, almost the sensa- 
tion, of those Christmas Eves long ago at Posen and 
Breslau, when I walked as a child along the wide 
streets, peeping into the windows where they were 
beginning to light the tapers of the Christmas- 
trees, and wondering whether I too, on returning 
home, should be let into a wonderful room all 
blazing with lights and gilded nuts and glass 
beads. They are hanging the last strings of 
those blue and red metallic beads, fastening on 
the last gilded and silvered walnuts on the trees 
out there at home in the North ; they are lighting 
the blue and red tapers ; the wax is beginning to 
run on to the beautiful spruce green branches ; 
the children are waiting with beating hearts behind 
the door, to be told that the Christ-Child has been. 
And I, for what am I waiting ? I don’t know ; 
all seems a dream ; everything vague and unsub- 
stantial about me, as if time had ceased, nothing 
could happen, my own desires and hopes were all 
dead, myself absorbed into I know not what passive 
dreamland. Do I long for to-night ? Do I dread 
it ? Will to-night ever come ? Do I feel anything, 
does anything exist all round me ? I sit and seem 
to see that street at Posen, the wide street with 
the windows illuminated by the Christmas lights, 
the green fir-branches grazing the window-panes. 

Christmas Eve } Midnight . — I have done it. I 


HA UNTINGS. 


56 

slipped out noiselessly. Sor Asdrubale and his 
sisters were fast asleep. I feared I had waked 
them, for my hatchet fell as I was passing through 
the principal room where my landlord keeps his 
curiosities for sale ; it struck against some old 
armour which he has been piecing. I heard him 
exclaim, half in his sleep ; and blew out my light 
and hid in the stairs. He came out in his dressing- 
gown, but finding no one, went back to bed again. 
“ Some cat, no doubt ! ” he said. I closed the 
house door softly behind me. The sky had be- 
come stormy since the afternoon, luminous with the 
full moon, but strewn with grey and buff-coloured 
vapours; every now and then the moon disappeared 
entirely. Not a creature abroad ; the tall gaunt 
houses staring in the moonlight. 

I know not why, I took a roundabout way to the 
Corte, past one or two church doors, whence issued 
the faint flicker of midnight mass. For a moment I 
felt a temptation to enter one of them ; but some- 
thing seemed to restrain me. I caught snatches of 
the Christmas hymn. I felt myself beginning to 
be unnerved, and hastened towards the Corte. As 
I passed under the portico at San Francesco I 
heard steps behind me ; it seemed to me that I 
was followed. I stopped to let the other pass. 
As he approached his pace flagged ; he passed 
close by me and murmured, “ Do not go : 1 am 
Giovanfrancesco Pico." I turned round ; he was 
gone. A coldness numbed me; but I hastened on. 


AMOUR DURE. 


57 


Behind the cathedral apse, in a narrow lane, I 
saw a man leaning against a wall. The moon- 
light was full upon him ; it seemed to me that his 
face, with a thin pointed beard, was streaming 
with blood. I quickened my pace ; but as I 
grazed by him he whispered, “Do not obey her; 
return home : I am Marcantonio Frangipani." 
My teeth chattered, but I hurried along the 
narrow lane, with the moonlight blue upon the 
white walls. 

At last I saw the Corte before me : the square 
was flooded with moonlight, the windows of the 
palace seemed brightly illuminated, and the statue 
of Duke Robert, shimmering green, seemed advanc- 
ing towards me on its horse. I came into the 
shadow. I had to pass beneath an archway. 
There started a figure as if out of the wall, and 
barred my passage with his outstretched cloaked 
arm. I tried to pass. He seized me by the arm, 
and his grasp was like a weight of ice. “You 
shall not pass ! ” he cried, and, as the moon came 
out once more, I saw his face, ghastly white and 
bound with an embroidered kerchief ; he seemed 
almost a child. “ You shall not pass ! ” he cried ; 
*< you shall not have her ! She is mine, and mine 
alone ! I am Prinzivalle degli Ordelaffi.” I felt 
his ice-cold clutch, but with my other arm I laid 
about me wildly with the hatchet which I carried 
beneath my cloak. The hatchet struck the wall 
and rang upon the stone. He had vanished. 


58 


HA UNTINGS. 


I hurried on. I did it. I cut open the bronze ; 
I sawed it into a wider gash. I tore out the silver 
image, and hacked it into innumerable pieces. As 
I scattered the last fragments about, the moon was 
suddenly veiled ; a great wind arose, howling down 
the square ; it seemed to me that the earth shook. 
I threw down the hatchet and the saw, and fled 
home. I felt pursued, as if by the tramp of 
hundreds of invisible horsemen. 

Now I am calm. It is midnight; another 
moment and she will be here ! Patience, my 
heart ! I hear it beating loud. I trust that no 
one will accuse poor Sor Asdrubale. I will write 
a letter to the authorities to declare his innocence 
should anything happen. . . . One ! the clock in 
the palace tower has just struck. . . . “ I hereby 
certify that, should anything happen this night to 
me, Spiridion Trepka, no one but myself is to be 
held ...” A step on the staircase ! It is she ! 
it is she ! At last, Medea, Medea ! Ah ! Amour 
Dure — Dure Amour ! 

Note. — Here ends the diary of the late Spiridion Trepka. 
The chief newspapers of the province of Umbria informed 
the public that, on Christmas morning of the year 1885, 
the bronze equestrian statue of Robert II. had been found 
grievously mutilated ; and that Professor Spiridion Trepka 
of Posen, in the German Empire, had been discovered 
dead of a stab in the region of the heart, given by an 
unknown hand. 






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Dtonea. 


From the Letters of Doctor Alessandro De Rosts to the 
Lady Evelyn Saveliy Princess of Sabina. 


Montemirto Ligure, fune 29, 1873. 

I take immediate advantage of the generous offer 
of your Excellency (allow an old Republican who 
has held you on his knees to address you by that 
title sometimes, 'tis so appropriate) to help our 
poor people. I never expected to come a-begging 
so soon. For the olive crop has been unusually 
plenteous. We semi-Genoese don't pick the olives 
unripe, like our Tuscan neighbours, but let them 
grow big and black, when the young fellows go 
into the trees with long reeds and shake them 
down on the grass for the women to collect — 
a pretty sight which your Excellency must see 
some day : the grey trees with the brown, bare- 
foot lads craning, balanced in the branches, and the 
turquoise sea as background just beneath. . . . 
That sea of ours — it is all along of it that I wish 
to ask for money. Looking up from my desk, I 

see the sea through the window, deep below and 
61 


62 


HA UNTINGS. 


beyond the olive woods, bluish-green in the sun- 
shine and veined with violet under the cloud-bars, 
like one of your Ravenna mosaics spread out as 
pavement for the world : a wicked sea, wicked in 
its loveliness, wickeder than your grey northern 
ones, and from which must have arisen in times 
gone by (when Phoenicians or Greeks built the 
temples at Lerici and Porto Venere) a baleful 
goddess of beauty, a Venus Verticordia, but in 
the bad sense of the word, overwhelming men's 
lives in sudden darkness like that squall of last 
week. 

To come to the point. I want you, dear Lady 
Evelyn, to promise me some money, a great deal 
of money, as much as would buy you a little 
mannish cloth frock — for the complete bringing- 
up, until years of discretion, of a young stranger 
whom the sea has laid upon our shore. Our 
people, kind as they are, are very poor, and over- 
burdened with children ; besides, they have got a 
certain repugnance for this poor little waif, cast 
up by that dreadful storm, and who is doubtless 
a heathen, for she had no little crosses or scapulars 
on, like proper Christian children. So, being unable 
to get any of our women to adopt the child, and 
having an old bachelor’s terror of my housekeeper, 
1 have bethought me of certain nuns, holy women, 
who teach little girls to say their prayers and 
make lace close by here ; and of }'our dear Ex- 
cellency to pay for the whole business. 


DION E A. 


63 


Poor little brown mite ! She was picked up after 
the storm (such a set-out of ship-models and votive 
candles as that storm must have brought the 
Madonna at Porto Venere !) on a strip of sand be- 
tween the rocks of our castle : the thing was really 
miraculous, for this coast is like a shark's jaw, and 
the bits of sand are tiny and far between. She 
was lashed to a plank, swaddled up close in out- 
landish garments; and when they brought her to 
me they thought she must certainly be dead : a 
little girl of four or five, decidedly pretty, and as 
brown as a berry, who, when she came to, shook 
her head to show she understood no kind of Italian, 
and jabbered some half-intelligible Eastern jabber, 
a few Greek words embedded in I know not what ; 
the Superior of the College De Propaganda Fide 
would be puzzled to know. The child appears to 
be the only survivor from a ship which must have 
gone down in the great squall, and whose timbers 
have been strewing the bay for some days past; 
no one at Spezia or in any of our ports knows 
anything about her, but she was seen, apparently 
making for Porto Venere, by some of our sardine- 
fishers : a big, lumbering craft, with eyes painted 
on each side of the prow, which, as you know, is a 
peculiarity of Greek boats. She was sighted for 
the last time off the island of Palmaria, entering, 
with all sails spread, right into the thick of the 
storm-darkness. No bodies, strangely enough, 
have been washed ashore. 


6 4 


• HAUNTINGS. 


July 10 . 

I have received the money, dear Donna Evelina. 
There was tremendous excitement down at San 
Massimo when the carrier came in with a registered 
letter, and I was sent for, in presence of all the 
village authorities, to sign my name on the postal 
register. 

The child has already been settled some days 
with the nuns ; such dear little nuns (nuns always 
go straight to the heart of an old priest-hater and 
conspirator against the Pope, you know), dressed 
in brown robes and close, white caps, with an 
immense round straw-hat flapping behind their 
heads like a nimbus : they are called Sisters of the 
Stigmata, and have a convent and school at San 
Massimo, a little way inland, with an untidy garden 
full of lavender and cherry-trees. Your protegee 
has already half set the convent, the village, the 
Episcopal See, the Order of St. Francis, by the ears. 
First, because nobody could make out whether or 
not she had been christened. The question was 
a grave one, for it appears (as your uncle-in-law, 
the Cardinal, will tell you) that it is almost equally 
undesirable to be christened twice over as not to 
be christened at all. The first danger was finally 
decided upon as the less terrible ; but the child, 
they say, had evidently been baptized before, and 
knew that the operation ought not to be repeated, 
for she kicked and plunged and yelled like twenty 


DION E A. 


65 


little devils, and positively would not let the holy 
water touch her. The Mother Superior, who 
always took for granted that the baptism had 
taken place before, says that the child was quite 
right, and that Heaven was trying to prevent a sacri- 
lege ; but the priest and the barber's wife, who had 
to hold her, think the occurrence fearful, and sus- 
pect the little girl of being a Protestant. Then the 
question of the name. Pinned to her clothes — 
striped Eastern things, and that kind of crinkled 
silk stuff they weave in Crete and Cyprus — was 
a piece of parchment, a scapular we thought at 
first, but which was found to contain only the 
name Aiovea — Dionea, as they pronounce it here. 
The question was, Could such a name be fitly 
borne by a young lady at the Convent of the Stig- 
mata ? Half the population here have names as 
unchristian quite — Norma, Odoacer, Archimedes 
— my housemaid is called Themis — but Dionea 
seemed to scandalise every one, perhaps because 
these good folk had a mysterious instinct that the 
name is derived from Dione, one of the loves of 
Father Zeus, and mother of no less a lady than 
the goddess Venus. The child was very near 
being called Maria, although there are already 
twenty-three other Marias, Mariettas, Mariuccias, 
and so forth at the convent. But the sister-book- 
keeper, who apparently detests monotony, bethought 
her to look out Dionea first in the Calendar, which 
proved useless ; and then in a big vellum-bound 

E 


66 


HA UNTINGS. 


book, printed at Venice in 1625, called “ Flos 
Sanctorum, or Lives of the Saints, by Father 
Ribadeneira, S.J., with the addition of such Saints 
as have no assigned place in the Almanack, other- 
wise called the Movable or Extravagant Saints.” 
The zeal of Sister Anna Maddalena has been re- 
warded, for there, among the Extravagant Saints, 
sure enough, with a border of palm-branches and 
hour-glasses, stands the name of Saint Dionea, 
Virgin and Martyr, a lady of Antioch, put to death 
by the Emperor Decius. I know your Excellency's 
taste for historical information, so I forward this 
item. But I fear, dear Lady Evelyn, I fear that 
the heavenly patroness of your little sea-waif was 
a much more extravagant saint than that. 

December 21 , 1879 . 

Many thanks, dear Donna Evelina, for the 
money for Dionea’s schooling. Indeed, it was not 
wanted yet : the accomplishments of young ladies 
are taught at a very moderate rate at Mon tern irto : 
and as to clothes, which you mention, a pair of 
wooden clogs, with pretty red tips, costs sixty-five 
centimes, and ought to last three years, if the 
owner is careful to carry them on her head in a 
neat parcel when out walking, and to put them on 
again only on entering the village. The Mother 
Superior is greatly overcome by your Excellency’s 
munificence towards the convent, and much per- 
turbed at being unable to send you a specimen of 


DION E A. 


6 7 

your protegee's skill, exemplified in an embroidered 
pocket-handkerchief or a pair of mittens ; but the 
fact is that poor Dionea has no skill. “ We will 
pray to the Madonna and St. Francis to make her 
more worthy,” remarked the Superior. Perhaps, 
however, your Excellency, who is, I fear but a 
Pagan woman (for all the Savelli Popes and St. 
Andrew Savelli’s miracles), and insufficiently appre- 
ciative of embfoidered pocket-handkerchiefs, will 
be quite as satisfied to hear that Dionea, instead 
of skill, has got the prettiest face of any little girl 
in Montemirto. She is tall, for her age (she is 
eleven) quite wonderfully well proportioned and 
extremely strong : of all the convent-full, she is 
the only one for whom I have never been called 
in. The features are very regular, the hair black, 
and despite all the good Sisters’ efforts to keep it 
smooth like a Chinaman’s, beautifully curly. I am 
glad she should be pretty, for she will more 
easily find a husband ; and also because it seems 
fitting that your protegee should be beautiful. 
Unfortunately her character is not so satisfactory : 
she hates learning, sewing, washing up the dishes, 
all equally. I am sorry to say she shows no 
natural piety. Her companions detest her, and 
the nuns, although they admit that she is not 
exactly naughty, seem to feel her as a dreadful 
thorn in the flesh. She spends hours and hours 
on the terrace overlooking the sea (her great 
desire, she confided to me, is to get to the sea — to 


68 


HAUNT1NGS. 


get back to the sea , as she expressed it), and lying 
in the garden, under the big myrtle-bushes, and, 
in spring and summer, under the rose-hedge. The 
nuns say that rose-hedge and that myrtle-bush are 
growing a great deal too big, one would think 
from Dionea's lying under them ; the fact, I 
suppose, has drawn attention to them. “ That 
child makes all the useless weeds grow/’ remarked 
Sister Reparata. Another of Dionea’s amusements 
is playing with pigeons. The number of pigeons 
she collects about her is quite amazing ; you would 
never have thought that San Massimo or the neigh- 
bouring hills contained as many. They flutter 
down like snowflakes, and strut and swell them- 
selves out, and furl and unfurl their tails, and peck 
with little sharp movements of their silly, sensual 
heads and a little throb and gurgle in their throats, 
while Dionea lies stretched out full length in the 
sun, putting out her lips, which they come to kiss, 
and uttering strange, cooing sounds; or hopping 
about, flapping her arms slowly like wings, and 
raising her little head with much the same odd 
gesture as they ; — ’tis a lovely sight, a thing fit for 
one of your painters, Burne Jones or Tadema, with 
the myrtle-bushes all round, the bright, white- 
washed convent walls behind, the white marble 
chapel steps (all steps are marble in this Carrara 
country), and the enamel blue sea through the 
ilex-branches beyond. But the good Sisters 
abominate these pigeons, who, it appears, are 


DIONEA. 


69 

messy little creatures, and they complain that, were 
it not that the Reverend Director likes a pigeon 
in his pot on a holiday, they could not stand the 
bother of perpetually sweeping the chapel steps 
and the kitchen threshold all along of those dirty 
birds. . . . 


August 6 , 1882 . 

Do not tempt me, dearest Excellency, with your 
invitations to Rome. I should not be happy there, 
and do but little honour to your friendship. My 
many years of exile, of wanderings in northern 
countries, have made me a little bit into a northern 
man : I cannot quite get on with my own fellow- 
countrymen, except with the good peasants and 
fishermen all round. Besides — forgive the vanity 
of an old man, who has learned to make triple 
acrostic sonnets to cheat the days and months at 
Theresienstadt and Spielberg — I have suffered too 
much for Italy to endure patiently the sight of 
little parliamentary cabals and municipal wrang- 
lings, although they also are necessary in this day 
as conspiracies and battles were in mine. I am 
not fit for your roomful of ministers and learned 
men and pretty women : the former would think 
me an ignoramus, and the latter — what would afflict 
me much more — a pedant. . . . Rather, if your 
Excellency really wants to show yourself and your 
children to your father’s old protege of Mazzinian 
times, find a few days to come here next spring. 


70 


HA UNTINGS. 


You shall have some very bare rooms with brick 
floors and white curtains opening out on my terrace ; 
and a dinner of all manner of fish and milk (the 
white garlic flowers shall be mown away from 
under the olives lest my cow should eat it) and 
eggs cooked in herbs plucked in the hedges. 
Your boys can go and see the big ironclads at 
Spezia ; and you shall come with me up our lanes 
fringed with delicate ferns and overhung by big 
olives, and into the fields where the cherry-trees 
shed their blossoms on to the budding vines, the 
fig-trees stretching out their little green gloves, 
where the goats nibble perched on their hind legs, 
and the cows low in the huts of reeds ; and there 
rise from the ravines, with the gurgle of the brooks, 
from the cliffs with the boom of the surf, the voices 
of unseen boys and girls, singing about love and 
flowers and death, just as in the days of Theocritus, 
whom your learned Excellency does well to read. 
Has your Excellency ever read Longus, a Greek 
pastoral novelist ? He is a trifle free, a trifle 
nude for us readers of Zola; but the old French of 
Amyot has a wonderful charm, and he gives one 
an idea, as no one else does, how folk lived In 
such valleys, by such sea-boards, as these in the 
days when daisy-chains and garlands of roses were 
still hung on the olive-trees for the nymphs of the 
grove ; when across the bay, at the end of the 
narrow neck of blue sea, there clung to the marble 
rocks not a church of Saint Laurence, with the 


DION E A. 


7i 


sculptured martyr on his gridiron, but the temple 
of Venus, protecting her harbour. . . . Yes, dear 
Lady Evelyn, you have guessed aright. Your old 
friend has returned to his sins, and is scribbling 
once more. But no longer at verses or political 
pamphlets. I am enthralled by a tragic history, 
the history of the fall of the Pagan Gods. . . . 
Have you ever read of their wanderings and dis- 
guises, in my friend Heine’s little book ? 

And if you come to Montemirto, you shall see 
also your protegee, of whom you ask for news. 
It has just missed being disastrous. Poor Dionea ! 
I fear that early voyage tied to the spar did no 
good to her wits, poor little waif! There has 
been a fearful row ; and it has required all my 
influence, and all the awfulness of your Excel- 
lency’s name, and the Papacy, and the Holy 
Roman Empire, to prevent her expulsion by the 
Sisters of the Stigmata. It appears that this mad 
creature very nearly committed a sacrilege : she 
was discovered handling in a suspicious manner 
the Madonna’s gala frock and her best veil of pizzo 
di Cantu , a gift of the late Marchioness Violante 
Vigalena of Fornovo. One of the orphans, Zaira 
Barsanti, whom they call the Rossaccia, even pre- 
tends to have surprised Dionea as she was about 
to adorn her wicked little person with these sacred 
garments ; and, on another occasion, when Dionea 
had been sent to pass some oil and sawdust over 
the chapel floor (it was the eve of Easter of the 


72 


HAUNTINGS. 


Roses), to have discovered her seated on the edge 
of the altar, in the very place of the Most Holy 
Sacrament. I was sent for in hot haste, and had 
to assist at an ecclesiastical council in the con- 
vent parlour, where Dionea appeared, rather out of 
place, an amazing little beauty, dark, lithe, with an 
odd, ferocious gleam in her eyes, and a still odder 
smile, tortuous, serpentine, like that of Leonardo 
da Vinci’s women, among the plaster images of 
St. Francis, and the glazed and framed samplers 
before the little statue of the Virgin, which wears in 
summer a kind of mosquito-curtain to guard it from 
the flies, who, as you know, are creatures of Satan. 

Speaking of Satan, does your Excellency know 
that on the inside of our little convent door, just 
above the little perforated plate of metal (like 
the rose of a watering-pot) through which the 
Sister-portress peeps and talks, is pasted a printed 
form, an arrangement of holy names and texts in 
triangles, and the stigmatised hands of St. Francis, 
and a variety of other devices, for the purpose, 
as is explained in a special notice, of baffling the 
Evil One, and preventing his entrance into that 
building ? Had you seen Dionea, and the stolid, 
contemptuous way in which she took, without 
attempting to refute, the various shocking allega- 
tions against her, your Excellency would have 
reflected, as I did, that the door in question must 
have been accidentally absent from the premises, 
perhaps at the joiner’s for repair, the day that 


DIONEA. 


73 


your protegee first penetrated into the convent. 
The ecclesiastical tribunal, consisting of the Mother 
Superior, three Sisters, the Capuchin Director, 
and your humble servant (who vainly attempted 
to be Devil’s advocate), sentenced Dionea, among 
other things, to make the sign of the cross twenty- 
six times on the bare floor with her tongue. Poor 
little child ! Gne might almost expect that, as 
happened when Dame Venus scratched her hand 
on the thorn-bush, red roses should sprout up 
between the fissures of the dirty old bricks. 

October 14 , 1883 - 

You ask whether, now that the Sisters let Dionea 
go and do half a day’s service how and then in the 
village, and that Dionea is a grown-up creature, 
she does not set the place by the ears with her 
beauty. The people here are quite aware of its 
existence. She is already dubbed La bella Dionea ; 
but that does not bring her any nearer getting a 
husband, although your Excellency’s generous offer 
of a wedding-portion is well known throughout the 
district of San Massimo and Montemirto. None 
of our boys, peasants or fishermen, seem to hang 
on her steps ; and if they turn round to stare and 
whisper as she goes by straight and dainty in her 
wooden clogs, with the pitcher of water or the 
basket of linen on her beautiful crisp dark head, 
it is, I remark, with an expression rather of fear 
than of love. The women, on their side, make 


74 


HAUNTINGS. 


horns with their fingers as she passes, and as they 
sit by her side in the convent chapel ; but that 
seems natural. My housekeeper tells me that 
down in the village she is regarded as possessing 
the evil eye and bringing love misery. “ You 
mean/' I said, “ that a glance from her is too much 
for our lads’ peace of mind.” Veneranda shook 
her head, and explained, with the deference and 
contempt with which she always mentions any 
of her countryfolk’s superstitions to me, that the 
matter is different : it’s not with her they are in 
love (they would be afraid of her eye), but where- 
ever she goes the young people must needs fall 
in love with each other, and usually where it is 
far from desirable. “You know Sora Luisa, the 
blacksmith’s widow ? Well, Dionea did a half- 
service for her last month, to prepare for the wed- 
ding of Luisa’s daughter. Well, now, the girl must 
say, forsooth ! that she won’t have Pieriho of Lerici 
any longer, but will have that raggamuffin Wooden 
Pipe from Solaro, or go into a convent. And the 
girl changed her mind the very day that Dionea 
had come into the house. Then there is the wife 
of Pippo, the coffee-house keeper; they say she 
is carrying on with one of the coastguards, and 
Dionea helped her to do her washing six weeks 
ago. The son of Sor Temistocle has just cut off 
a finger to avoid the conscription, because he is 
mad about his cousin and afraid of being taken 
for a soldier; and it is a fact that some of the 


DION E A. 


75 


shirts which were made for him at the Stigmata 
had been sewn by Dionea ; ” . . . and thus a per- 
fect string of love misfortunes, enough to make a 
little “ Decameron," I assure you, and all laid to 
Dionea’s account. Certain it is that the people 
of San Massimo are terribly afraid of Dionea. . . . 

July 17, 1884. 

Dionea's strange influence seems to be extending 
in a terrible way. I am almost beginning to think 
that our folk are correct in their fear of the young 
witch. I used to think, as physician to a convent, 
that nothing was more erroneous than all the 
romancings of Diderot and Schubert (your Excel- 
lency sang me his “ Young Nun” once: do you 
recollect, just before your marriage?), and that no 
more humdrum creature existed than one of our 
little nuns, with their pink baby faces under their 
tight white caps. It appeared the romancing was 
more correct than the prose. Unknown things 
have sprung up in these good Sisters' hearts, as 
unknown flowers have sprung up among the myrtle- 
bushes and the rose-hedge which Dionea lies under. 
Did I ever mention to you a certain little Sister 
Giuliana, who professed only two years ago? — a 
funny rose and white little creature presiding over 
the infirmary, as prosaic a little saint as ever 
kissed a crucifix or scoured a saucepan. Well, 
Sister Giuliana has disappeared, and the same day 
has disappeared also a sailor-boy from the port. 


76 


HA UNTINGS. 


August 20, 1884. 

The case of Sister Giuliana seems to have been 
but the beginning of an extraordinary love epi- 
demic at the Convent of the Stigmata : the elder 
schoolgirls have to be kept under lock and key 
lest they should talk over the wall in the moon- 
light, or steal out to the little hunchback who 
writes love-letters at a penny a-piece, beautiful 
flourishes and all, under the portico by the Fish- 
market. I wonder does that wicked little Dionea, 
whom no one pays court to, smile (her lips like 
a Cupid’s bow or a tiny snake’s curves) as she 
calls the pigeons down around her, or lies fond- 
ling the cats under the myrtle-bush, when she sees 
the pupils going about with swollen, red eyes ; the 
poor little nuns taking fresh penances on the cold 
chapel flags ; and hears the long-drawn guttural 
vowels, amove and morte and mio bene , which rise 
up of an evening, with the boom of the surf and 
the scent of the lemon-flowers, as the young men 
wander up and down, arm-in-arm, twanging their 
guitars along the moonlit lanes under the olives ? 

October 20, 1885. 

A terrible, terrible thing has happened ! I write 
to your Excellency with hands all a-tremble ; and 
yet I must write, I must speak, or else I shall cry 
out. Did I ever mention to you Father Domenico 
of Casoria, the confessor of our Convent of the 


DION E A. 


77 


Stigmata? A young man, tall, emaciated with 
fasts and vigils, but handsome like the monk 
playing the virginal in Giorgione's “ Concert," and 
under his brown serge still the most stalwart 
fellow of the country all round ? One has heard 
of men struggling with the tempter. Well, well, 
Father Domenico had struggled as hard as any of 
the Anchorites recorded by St. Jerome, and he had 
conquered. I never knew anything comparable to 
the angelic serenity of gentleness of this victori- 
ous soul. I don't like monks, but I loved Father 
Domenico. I might have been his father, easily, 
yet I always felt a certain shyness and awe of 
him ; and yet men have accounted me a clean- 
lived man in my generation ; but I felt, whenever 
I approached him, a poor worldly creature, debased 
by the knowledge of so many mean and ugly things. 
Of late Father Domenico had seemed to me less 
calm than usual : his eyes had grown strangely 
bright, and red spots had formed on his salient 
cheekbones. One day last week, taking his hand, 
I felt his pulse flutter, and all his strength as it 
were, liquefy under my touch. “ You are ill," I 
said. “You have fever, Father Domenico. You 
have been overdoing yourself — some new privation, 
some new penance. Take care and do not tempt 
Heaven ; remember the flesh is weak." Father 
Domenico withdrew his hand quickly. “ Do not say 
that,” he cried ; “the flesh is strong!” and turned 
away his face. His eyes were glistening and he 


78 HAUNTINGS. 

shook all over. 11 Some quinine/’ I ordered. But 
I felt it was no case for quinine. Prayers might be 
more useful, and could I have given them he should 
not have wanted. Last night I was suddenly sent 
for to Father Domenico’s monastery above Monte- 
mirto : they told me he was ill. I ran up through 
the dim twilight of moonbeams and olives with a 
sinking heart. Something told me my monk was 
dead. He was lying in a little low whitewashed 
room ; they had carried him there from his own 
cell in hopes he might still be alive. The windows 
were wide open ; they framed some olive-branches, 
glistening in the moonlight, and far below, a strip 
of moonlit sea. When I told them that he was 
really dead, they brought some tapers and lit them 
at his head and feet, and placed a crucifix between 
his hands. “ The Lord has been pleased to call 
our poor brother to Him,” said the Superior. “ A 
case of apoplexy, my dear Doctor — a case of 
apoplexy. You will make out the certificate for the 
authorities.” I made out the certificate. It was 
weak of me. But, after all, why make a scandal ? 
He certainly had no wish to injure the poor 
monks. 

Next day I found the little nuns all in tears. 
They were gathering flowers to send as a last gift 
to their confessor. In the convent garden I found 
Dionea, standing by the side of a big basket of 
roses, one of the white pigeons perched on her 
shoulder, 


DIONEA. 


79 

“ So,” she said, “ he has killed himself with 
charcoal, poor Padre Domenico ! ” 

Something in her tone, her eyes, shocked me. 

“ God has called to Himself one of His most 
faithful servants,” I said gravely. 

Standing opposite this girl, magnificent, radiant 
in her beauty r before the rose-hedge, with the 
white pigeons furling and unfurling, strutting and 
pecking all round, I seemed to see suddenly the 
whitewashed room of last night, the big crucifix, 
that poor thin face under the yellow waxlight. 
I felt glad for F ather Domenico ; his battle was 
over. 

“Take this to Father Domenico from me,” said 
Dionea, breaking off a twig of myrtle starred over 
with white blossom ; and raising her head with 
that smile like the twist of a young snake, she 
sang out in a high guttural voice a strange 
chaunt, consisting of the word Amor — amor — 
amor. I took the branch of myrtle and threw it 
in her face. 


Jaunary 3 , 1886 , 

It will be difficult to find a place for Dionea, 
and in this neighbourhood well-nigh impossible. 
The people associate her somehow with the death 
of Father Domenico, which has confirmed her reputa- 
tion of having the evil eye. She left the convent 
(being now seventeen) some two months back, and 
i§ at present gaining her bread working with the 


8o 


HA UN TINGS. 


masons at our notary's new house at Lerici : the 
work is hard, but our women often do it, and it is 
magnificent to see Dionea, in her short white skirt 
and tight white bodice, mixing the smoking lime 
with her beautiful strong arms ; or, *an empty sack 
drawn over her head and shoulders, walking ma- 
jestically up the cliff, up the scaffoldings with her 
load of bricks. ... I am, however, very anxious 
to get Dionea out of the neighbourhood, because I 
cannot help dreading the annoyances to which her 
reputation for the evil eye exposes her, and even 
some explosion of rage if ever she should lose the 
indifferent contempt with which she treats them. 
I hear that one of the rich men of our part of the 
world, a certain Sor Agostino of Sarzana, who owns 
a whole flank of marble mountain, is looking out 
for a maid for his daughter, who is about to be 
married ; kind people and patriarchal in their 
riches, the old man still sitting down to table 
with all his servants ; and his nephew, who is 
going to be his son-in-law, a splendid young 
fellow, who has worked like Jacob, in the quarry 
and at the saw-mill, for love of his pretty cousin. 
That whole house is so good, simple, and peaceful, 
that I hope it may tame down even Dionea. If I 
do not succeed in getting Dionea this place (and 
all your Excellency's illustriousness and all my poor 
eloquence will be needed to counteract the sinister 
reports attaching to our poor little waif), it will 
be best to accept your suggestion of taking the girl 


DIONEA. 


81 


into your household at Rome, since you are curious 
to see what you call our baleful beauty. I am 
amused, and a little indignant at what you say 
about your footmen being handsome: Don Juan 
himself, my dear Lady Evelyn, would be cowed by 
Dionea. . . . 


May 29, 1886. 

Here is Dionea back upon our hands once more ! 
but I cannot send her to your Excellency. Is it 
from living among these peasants and fishing-folk, 
or is it because, as people pretend, a sceptic is 
always superstitious ? I could not muster courage 
to send you Dionea, although your boys are still in 
sailor-clothes and your uncle, the Cardinal, is eighty- 
four ; and as to the Prince, why, he bears the most 
potent amulet against Dionea's terrible powers in 
your own dear capricious person. Seriously, there 
is something eerie in this coincidence. Poor 
Dionea ! I feel sorry for her, exposed to the passion 
of a once patriarchally respectable old man. I 
feel even more abashed at the incredible audacity, 
I should almost say sacrilegious madness, of the 
vile old creature. But still the coincidence is 
strange and uncomfortable. Last week the light- 
ning struck a huge olive in the orchard of Sor 
Agostino's house above Sarzana. Under the olive 
was Sor Agostino himself, who was killed on the 
spot ; and opposite, not twenty paces off, drawing 
water from the well, unhurt and calm, was Dionea. 

F 


82 


HAUN TINGS. 


It was the end of a sultry afternoon : I was on a 
terrace in one of those villages of ours, jammed, 
like some hardy bush, in the gash of a hill-side. 
I saw the storm rush down the valley, a sudden 
blackness, and then, like a curse, a flash, a tremen- 
dous crash, re-echoed by a dozen hills. “ I told 
him,” Dionea said very quietly, when she came to 
stay with me the next day (for Sor Agostino's 
family would not have her for another half-minute), 
“ that if he did not leave me alone Heaven would 
send him an accident.” 


July 15, 1886. 

My book ? Oh, dear Donna Evelina, do not 
make me blush by talking of my book ! Do not 
make an old man, respectable, a Government func- 
tionary (communal physician of the district of San 
Massimo and Montemirto Ligure), confess that 
he is but a lazy unprofitable dreamer, collecting 
materials as a child picks hips out of a hedge, only 
to throw them away, liking them merely for the 
little occupation of scratching his hands and stand- 
ing on tiptoe, for their pretty redness. . . . You 
remember what Balzac says about projecting any 
piece of work ? — “ Cest fumer des cigarettes en- 
cliantees .” . . . Well, well ! The data obtainable 
about the ancient gods in their days of adversity 
are few and far between : a quotation here and 
there from the Fathers ; two or three legends ; 
Venus reappearing ; the persecutions of Apollo in 


DION E A. 


S3 


Styria ; Proserpina going, in Chaucer, to reign 
over the fairies ; a few obscure religious persecu- 
tions in the Middle Ages on the score of Paganism ; 
some strange rites practised till lately in the depths 
of a Breton forest near Lannion. ... As to 
Tannhauser, he was a real knight, and a sorry 
one, and a real Minnesinger not of the best. Your 
Excellency will find some of his poems in Von der 
Hagen’s four immense volumes, but I recommend 
you to take your notions of Ritter Tannhauser’s 
poetry rather from Wagner. Certain it is that the 
Pagan divinities lasted much longer than we suspect, 
sometimes in their own nakedness, sometimes in 
the stolen garb of the Madonna or the saints. Who 
knows whether they do not exist to this day ? 
And, indeed, is it possible they should not ? For 
the awfulness of the deep woods, with their filtered 
green light, the creak of the swaying, solitary reeds, 
exists, and is Pan ; and the blue, starry May night 
exists, the sough of the waves, the warm wind carry- 
ing the sweetness of the lemon-blossoms, the bitter- 
ness of the myrtle on our rocks, the distant chaunt 
of the boys cleaning out their nets, of the girls 
sickling the grass under the olives, Amor — amor — 
amor, and all this is the great goddess Venus. And 
opposite to me, as I write, between the branches 
of the ilexes, across the blue sea, streaked like a 
Ravenna mosaic with purple and green, shimmer 
the white houses and walls, the steeple and towers, 
an enchanted Fata Morgana city, of dim Porto 


8 4 


HAUNTINGS . 


Venere ; . . . and I mumble to myself the verse 
of Catullus, but addressing a greater and more 
terrible goddess than he did : — 

“ Procul a mea sit furor omnis, Hera, domo ; 
alios ; age incitatos, alios age rabidos.” 

March 25, 1887. 

Yes ; I will do everything in my power for your 
friends. Are you well-bred folk as well bred as we, 
Republican bourgeois , with the coarse hands (though 
you once told me mine were psychic hands when 
the mania of palmistry had not yet been succeeded 
by that of the Reconciliation between Church and 
State), I wonder, that you should apologise, you 
whose father fed me and housed me and clothed 
me in my exile, for giving me the horrid trouble of 
hunting for lodgings ? It is like you, dear Donna 
Evelina, to have sent me photographs of my future 
friend Waldemar’s statue. ... I have no love 
for modern sculpture, for all the hours I have 
spent in Gibson’s and Dupre’s studio : 'tis a dead 
art we should do better to bury. But your 
Waldemar has something of the old spirit : he 
seems to feel the divineness of the mere body, the 
spirituality of a limpid stream of mere physical 
life. But why among these statues only men and 
boys, athletes and fauns ? Why only the bust of 
that thin, delicate-lipped little Madonna wife of 
his ? Why no wide-shouldered Amazon or broad- 
flanked Aphrodite ? 


DIONEA. 


85 


April 10. 1887. 

You ask me how poor Dionea is getting on. 
Not as your Excellency and I ought to have ex- 
pected when we placed her with the good Sisters 
of the Stigmata : although I wager that, fantastic 
and capricious as you are, you would be better 
pleased (hiding it carefully from that grave side of 
you which bestows devout little books and carbolic 
acid upon the indigent) that your protegee should 
be a witch than a serving-maid, a maker of philters 
rather than a knitter of stockings and sewer of 
shirts. 

A maker of philters. Roughly speaking, that is 
Dionea’s profession. She lives upon the money 
which I dole out to her (with many useless objur- 
gations) on behalf of your Excellency ; and her 
ostensible employment is mending nets, collecting 
olives, carrying bricks, and other miscellaneous 
jobs; but her real status is that of village sorceress. 
You think our peasants are sceptical ? Perhaps 
they do not believe in thought-reading, mesmerism, 
and ghosts, like you, dear Lady Evelyn. But they 
believe very firmly in the evil eye, in magic, and 
in love-potions. Every one has his little story of 
this or that which happened to his brother or 
cousin or neighbour. My stable-boy and male 
factotum's brother-in-law, living some years ago in 
Corsica, was seized with a longing for a dance 
with his beloved at one of those balls which our 


86 


HAUNTINGS. 


peasants give in the winter, when the snow makes 
leisure in the mountains. A wizard anointed him 
for money, and straightway he turned into a black 
cat, and in three bounds was over the seas, at the 
door of his uncle’s cottage, and among the dancers. 
He caught his beloved by the skirt to draw her 
attention ; but she replied with a kick which sent 
him squealing back to Corsica. When he returned 
in summer he refused to marry the lady, and 
carried his left arm in a sling. “ You broke it 
when I came to the Veglia ! ” he said, and all 
seemed explained. Another lad, returning from 
working in the vineyards near Marseilles, was 
walking up to his native village, high in our hills, 
one moonlight night. He heard sounds of fiddle 
and fife from a roadside barn, and saw yellow 
light from its chinks ; and then entering, he found 
many women dancing, old and young, and among 
them his affianced. He tried to snatch her round 
the waist for a waltz (they play Mme. Angot at 
our rustic balls), but the girl was unclutchable, 
and whispered, “ Go ; for these are witches, who 
will kill thee ; and I am a witch also. Alas ! I 
shall go to hell when I die.” 

I could tell your Excellency dozens of such 
stories. But love-philters are among the commonest 
things to sell and buy. Do you remember the sad 
little story of Cervantes’ Licentiate, who, instead 
of a love-potion, drank a philter which made him 
think he was made of glass, fit emblem of a poor 


DION E A. 


87 


mad poet? ... It is love-philters that Dionea 
prepares. No ; do not misunderstand ; they do not 
give love of her, still less her love. Your seller of 
love-charms is as cold as ice, as pure as snow. 
The priest has crusaded against her, and stones 
have flown at her as she went by from dissatisfied 
lovers ; and the very children, paddling in the sea 
and making mud-pies in the sand, have put out 
forefinger and little finger and screamed, “ Witch, 
witch ! ugly witch ! ” as she passed with basket or 
brick load ; but Dionea has only smiled, that snake- 
like, amused smile, but more ominous than of yore. 
The other day I determined to seek her and argue 
with her on the subject of her evil trade. Dionea 
has a certain regard for me ; not, I fancy, a result 
of gratitude, but rather the recognition of a certain 
admiration and awe which she inspires in your 
Excellency's foolish old servant. She has taken 
up her abode in a deserted hut, built of dried reeds 
and thatch, such as they keep cows in, among the 
olives on the cliffs. She was not there, but about 
the hut pecked some white pigeons, and from it, 
startling me foolishly with its unexpected sound, 
came the eerie bleat of her pet goat. . . . Among 
the olives it was twilight already, with streakings 
of faded rose in the sky, and faded rose, like long 
trails of petals, on the distant sea. I clambered 
down among the myrtle-bushes and came to a 
little semicircle of yellow sand, between two high 
and jagged rocks, the place where the sea had 


88 


HA UNTINGS. 


deposited Dionea after the wreck. She was seated 
there on the sand, her bare foot dabbling in the 
waves ; she had twisted a wreath of myrtle and 
wild roses on her black, crisp hair. Near her was 
one of our prettiest girls, the Lena of Sor Tullio 
the blacksmith, with ashy, terrified face under her 
flowered kerchief. I determined to speak to the 
child, but without startling her now, for she is a 
nervous, hysteric little thing. So I sat on the 
rocks, screened by the myrtle-bushes, waiting till 
the girl had gone. Dionea, seated listless on the 
sands, leaned over the sea and took some of its 
water in the hollow of her hand. “ Here,” she 
said to the Lena of Sor Tullio, “ fill your bottle 
with this and give it to drink to Tommasino the 
Rosebud.” Then she set to singing : — 

11 Love is salt, like sea- water — I drink and I die 
of thirst. . . . Water ! water ! Yet the more I 
drink, the more I burn. Love ! thou art bitter as 
the seaweed.” 


April 20, 1887. 

Your friends are settled here, dear Lady Evelyn. 
The house is built in what was once a Genoese 
fort, growing like a grey spiked aloes out of the 
marble rocks of our bay ; rock and wall (the walls 
existed long before Genoa was ever heard of) 
grown almost into a homogeneous mass, delicate 
grey, stained with black and yellow lichen, and 
dotted here and there with myrtle-shoots and crim- 


DIONEA. 


89 


son snapdragon. In what was once the highest 
enclosure of the fort, where your friend Gertrude 
watches the maids hanging out the fine white 
sheets and pillow-cases to dry (a bit of the North, 
of Hermann and Dorothea transferred to the South), 
a great twisted fig-tree juts out like an eccentric 
gurgoyle over the sea, and drops its ripe fruit into 
the deep blue pools. There is but scant furniture 
in the house, but a great oleander overhangs it, 
presently to burst into pink splendour; and on 
all the window-sills, even that of the kitchen (such 
a background of shining brass saucepans Walde- 
mar’s wife has made of it !) are pipkins and tubs 
full of trailing carnations, and tufts of sweet basil 
and thyme and mignonette. She pleases me most, 
your Gertrude, although you foretold I should 
prefer the husband ; with her thin white face, a 
Memling Madonna finished by some Tuscan sculptor, 
and her long, delicate white hands ever busy, like 
those of a mediaeval lady, with some delicate piece 
of work ; and the strange blue, more limpid than 
the sky and deeper than the sea, of her rarely 
lifted glance. 

It is in her company that I like Waldemar best ; 
I prefer to the genius that infinitely tender and 
respectful, I would not say lover — yet I have no 
other word — of his pale wife. He seems to me, 
when with her, like some fierce, generous, wild 
thing from the woods, like tne lion of Una, fame 
and submissive to this saint. . . . This tenderness 


90 


HA UNTINGS. 


is really very beautiful on the part of that big lion 
Waldemar, with his odd eyes,, as of some wild 
animal — odd, and, your Excellency remarks, not 
without a gleam of latent ferocity. I think that 
hereby hangs the explanation of his never doing 
any but male figures : the female figure, he says 
(and your Excellency must hold him responsible, 
not me, for such profanity), is almost inevitably 
inferior in strength and beauty ; woman is not 
form, but expression, and therefore suits paint- 
ing, but not sculpture. The point of a woman 
is not her body, but (and here his eyes rested 
very tenderly upon the thin white profile of 
his wife) her soul. “ Still,” I answered, “ the 
ancients, who understood such matters, did manu- 
facture some tolerable female statues : the Fates 
of the Parthenon, the Phidian Pallas, the V.enus 
of Milo." . . . 

“ Ah ! yes," exclaimed Waldemar, smiling, with 
that savage gleam of his eyes ; “ but those are not 
women, and the people who made them have left 
us the tales of Endymion, Adonis, Anchises : a 
goddess might sit for them.” . . . 


May 5, 1887. 

Has it ever struck your Excellency in one of 
your La Rochefoucauld fits (in Lent say, after too 
many balls) that not merely maternal but conjugal 
unselfishness may be a very selfish thing ? There ! 
you toss your little head at my words ; yet I wager 


DI&&EA. 


9 1 


I have heard you say that other women may think 
it right to humour their husbands, but as to you, 
the Prince must learn that a wife’s duty is as much 
to chasten her husband’s whims as to satisfy them. 
I really do feel indignant that such a snow-white 
saint should wish another woman to part with 
all instincts of modesty merely because that other 
woman would be a good model for her husband ; 
really it is intolerable. “ Leave the girl alone,” 
Waldemar said, laughing. “ What do I want with 
the unaesthetic sex, as Schopenhauer calls it ? ” 
But Gertrude has set her heart on his doing a 
female figure ; it seems that folk have twitted him 
with never having produced one. She has long 
been on the look-out for a model for him. It is 
odd to see this pale, demure, diaphanous creature, 
net the more earthly for approaching motherhood, 
scanning the girls of our village with the eyes of 
a slave-dealer. 

“ If you insist on speaking to Dionea,” I said, 
il I shall insist on speaking to her at the same 
time, to urge her to refuse your proposal.” But 
Waldemar’s pale wife was indifferent to all my 
speeches about modesty being a poor girl’s only 
dowry. “ She will do for a Venus,” she merely 
answered. 

We went up to the cliffs' together, after some 
sharp words, Waldemars wife hanging on my arm 
as we slowly clambered up the stony path among 
the olives. We found Dionea at the door of her 


92 


HA UNTINGS. 


hut, making faggots of myrtle-branches. She 
listened sullenly to Gertrude’s offer and explana- 
tions ; indifferently to my admonitions not to ac- 
cept. The thought of stripping for the view of a 
man, which would send a shudder through our 
most brazen village girls, seemed not to startle 
her, immaculate and savage as she is accounted. 
She did not answer, but sat under the olives, look- 
ing vaguely across the sea. At that moment Wal- 
demar came up to us ; he had followed with the 
intention of putting an end to these wranglings. 

“ Gertrude,” he said, “ do leave her alone. I 
have found a model — a fisher-boy, whom I much 
prefer to any woman.” 

Dionea raised her head with that serpentine 
smile. “ I will come,” she said. 

Waldemar stood silent ; his eyes were fixed on 
her, where she stood under the olives, her white 
shift loose about her splendid throat, her shining 
feet bare in the grass. Vaguely, as if not knowing 
what he said, he asked her name. She answered 
that her name was Dionea ; for the rest, she was 
an Innocentina, that is to say, a foundling; then 
she began to sing : — 

“ Flower of the myrtle ! 

My father is the starry sky ; 

The mother that made me is the sea.” 

June 22, 1887. 

I confess I was an old fool to have grudged 


DION E A. 


93 


Waldemar his model. As I watch him gradually 
building up his statue, watch the goddess gradually 
emerging from the clay heap, I ask myself — and 
the case might trouble a more subtle moralist than 
me — whether a village girl, an obscure, useless life 
within the bounds of what we choose to call right 
and wrong, can be weighed against the possession 
by mankind of a great work of art, a Venus 
immortally beautiful ? Still, I am glad that the 
two alternatives need not be weighed against each 
other. Nothing can equal the kindness of Ger- 
trude, now that Dionea has consented to sit to 
her husband ; the girl is ostensibly merely a 
servant like any other ; and, lest any report of her 
real functions should get abroad and discredit her at 
San Massimo or Montemirto, she is to be taken to 
Rome, where no one will be the wiser, and where, 
by the way, your Excellency will have an opportunity 
of comparing Waldemar’s goddess of love with 
our little orphan of the Convent of the Stigmata. 
What reassures me still more is the curious at- 
titude oC Waldemar towards the girl. I could 
never have believed that an artist could regard a 
woman so utterly as a mere inanimate thing, a 
form to copy, like a tree or flower. Truly he 
carries out his theory that sculpture knows only 
the body, and the body scarcely considered as 
human. The way in which he speaks to Dionea 
after hours of the most rapt contemplation of her is 
almost brutal in its coldness. And yet to hear him 


94 


HA UNTINGS . 


exclaim, “ How beautiful she is ! Good God, how 7 
beautiful ! ” No love of mere woman was ever 
so violent as this love of woman’s mere shape. 

June 27, 1887.- 

You asked me once, dearest Excellency, whether 
there survived among our people (you had evidently 
added a volume on folk-lore to that heap of half- 
cut, dog’s-eared books that litter about among the 
Chineseries and mediaeval brocades of your rooms) 
any trace of Pagan myths. I explained to you 
then that all our fairy mythology, classic gods, 
and demons and heroes, teemed with fairies, ogres, 
and princes. Last night I had a curious proof 
of this. Going to see the Waldemar, I found 
Dionea seated under the oleander at the top of 
the old Genoese fort, telling stories to the two little 
blonde children who were making the falling 
pink blossoms into necklaces at her feet ; the 
pigeons, Dionea’s white pigeons, which never leave 
her, strutting and pecking among the basil pots, and 
the white gulls flying round the rocks overhead. 
This is what I heard. . . . “ And the three fairies 
said to the youngest son of the King, to the one 
who had been brought up as a shepherd, 'Take this 
apple, and give it to her among us who is most 
beautiful.’ And the first fairy said, ' If thou give 
it to me thou shalt be Emperor of Rome, and 
have purple clothes, and have a gold crow T n and 
gold armour, and horses and courtiers ; ' and the 


DION E A . 


95 


second said, ' If thou give it to me thou shalt be 
Pope, and wear a mitre, and have the keys of 
heaven and hell ; ’ and the third fairy said, 1 Give 
the apple to me, for I will give thee the most 
beautiful lady to wife.’ And the youngest son 
of the King sat in the green meadow and thought 
about it a little, and then said, * What use is there in 
being Emperor or Pope? Give me the beautiful lady 
to wife, since I am young myself.’ And he gave 
the apple to the third of the three fairies.” . . . 

Dionea droned out the story in her half-Genoese 
dialect, her eyes looking far away across the blue 
sea, dotted with sails like white sea-gulls, that 
strange serpentine smile on her lips. 

“ Who told thee that fable ? ” I asked. 

She took a handful of oleander-blossoms from 
the ground, and throwing them in the air, answered 
listlessly, as she watched the little shower of rosy 
petals descend on her black hair and pale breast — 
“ Who knows ? ” 


July 6, 1887. 

How strange is the power of art ! Has Wal- 
demar’s statue shown me the real Dionea, or has 
Dionea really grown more strangely beautiful than 
before ? Your Excellency will laugh ; but when I 
meet her I cast down my eyes after the first 
glimpse of her loveliness; not with the shyness of 
a ridiculous old pursuer of the Eternal Feminine, 
but with a sort of religious awe — the feeling with 


9 6 


HA UN TINGS. 


which, as a child kneeling by my mother’s side, I 
looked down on the church flags when the Mass 
bell told the elevation of the Host. . . . Do you 
remember the story of Zeuxis and the ladies of 
Crotona, five of the fairest not being too much 
for his Juno? Do you remember — you, who have 
read everything — all the bosh of our writers about 
the Ideal in Art ? Why, here is a girl who dis- 
proves all this nonsense in a minute; she is far, 
far more beautiful than Waldemar’s statue of her. 
He said so angrily, only yesterday, when his wife 
took me into his studio (he has made a studio of the 
long-desecrated chapel of the old Genoese fort, itself, 
they say, occupying the site of the temple of Venus). 

As he spoke that odd spark of ferocity dilated 
in his eyes, and seizing the largest of his model- 
ling tools, he obliterated at one swoop the whole 
exquisite face. Poor Gertrude turned ashy white, 
and a convulsion passed over her face. . . . 

July 15 . 

I wish I could make Gertrude understand, and 
yet I could never, never bring myself to say a word. 
As a matter of fact, what is there to be said ? 
Surely she knows best that her husband will never 
love any woman but herself. Yet ill, nervous as 
she is, I quite understand that she must loathe this 
unceasing talk of Dionea, of the superiority of the 
model over the statue. Cursed statue ! I wish it 
were finished, or else that it had never been begun. 


DION E A. 


97 


July 20. 

This morning Waldemar came to me. He 
seemed strangely agitated : I guessed he had some- 
thing to tell me, and yet I could never ask. Was 
it cowardice on my part ? He sat in my shuttered 
room, the sunshine making pools on the red bricks 
and tremulous stars on the ceiling, talking of many 
things at random, and mechanically turning over 
the manuscript, the heap of notes of my poor, 
never-finished book on the Exiled Gods. Then 
he rose, and walking nervously round my study, 
talking disconnectedly about his work, his eye 
suddenly fell upon a little altar, one of my few 
antiquities, a little block of marble with a carved 
garland and rams’ heads, and a half-effaced inscrip- 
tion dedicating it to Venus, the mother of Love. 

“ It was found,” I explained, “ in the ruins of 
the temple, somewhere on the site of your studio : 
so, at least, the man said from whom I bought it.” 

Waldemar looked at it long. “ So,” he said, 
11 this little cavity was to burn the incense in ; or 
rather, I suppose, since it has two little gutters 
running into it, for collecting the blood of the 
victim ? Well, well ! they were wiser in that 
day, to wring the neck of a pigeon or burn a 
pinch of incense than to eat their own hearts 
out, as we do, all along of Dame Venus ; ” and 
he laughed, and left me with that odd ferocious 
lighting-up of his face. Presently there came a 

G 


9 S 


HAUNTINGS. 


knock at my door. It was Waldemar. “ Doctor,” 
he said very quietly, 11 will you do me a favour ? 
Lend me your little Venus altar — only for a few 
days, only till the day after to-morrow. I want to 
copy the design of it for the pedestal of my statue : 
it is appropriate.” I sent the altar to him : the 
lad who carried it told me that Waldemar had set 
it up in the studio, and calling for a flask of wine, 
poured out two glasses. One he had given to 
my messenger for his pains ; of the other he had 
drunk a mouthful, and thrown the rest over the 
altar, saying some unknown words. “ It must be 
some German habit,” said my servant. What odd 
fancies this man has ! 


July 25 . 

You ask me, dearest Excellency, to send you 
some sheets of my book : you want to know what 
I have discovered. Alas ! dear Donna Evelina, I 
have discovered, I fear, that there is nothing to 
discover; that Apollo was never in Styria; that 
Chaucer, when he called the Queen of the Fairies 
Proserpine, meant nothing more than an eighteenth 
century poet when he called Dolly or Betty 
Cynthia or Amaryllis ; that the lady who damned 
poor Tannhauser was not Venus, but a mere little 
Suabian mountain sprite ; in fact, that poetry is 
only the invention of poets, and that that rogue, 
Heinrich Heine, is entirely responsible for the exist- 
ence of Dieux en Exil. . . . My poor manuscript 


DIONEA . 


99 


can only tell you what St. Augustine, Tertullian, 
and sundry morose old Bishops thought about 
the loves of Father Zeus and the miracles of the 
Lady Isis, none of which is much worth your at- 
tention. . . . Reality, my dear Lady Evelyn, is 
always prosaic : at least when investigated into by 
bald old gentlemen like me. 

And yet, it does not look so. The world, at 
times, seems to be playing at being poetic, mys- 
terious, full of wonder and romance. I am writing 
as usual, by my window, the moonlight brighter in 
its whiteness than my mean little yellow-shining 
lamp. From the mysterious greyness, the olive 
groves and lanes beneath my terrace, rises a con- 
fused quaver of frogs, and buzz and whirr of insects : 
something, in sound, like the vague trails of count- 
less stars, the galaxies on galaxies blurred into 
mere blue shimmer by the moon, which rides 
slowly across the highest heaven. The olive twigs 
glisten in the rays : the flowers of the pomegranate 
and oleander are only veiled as with bluish mist 
in their scarlet and rose. In the sea is another 
sea, of molten, rippled silver, or a magic causeway 
leading to the shining vague offing, the luminous 
pale sky-line, where the islands of Palmaria and 
Tino float like unsubstantial, shadowy dolphins. 
The roofs of Montemirto glimmer among the black, 
pointing cypresses : farther below, at the end of 
that half-moon of land, is San Massimo : the 
Genoese fort inhabited by our friends is profiled 


100 


HA UNTINGS. 


black against the sky. All is drrk : our fisher- 
folk go to bed early ; Gertrude and the little ones 
are asleep : they at least are, for I can imagine 
Gertrude lying awake, the moonbeams on her thin 
Madonna face, smiling as she thinks of the little 
ones around her, of the other tiny thing that will 
soon lie on her breast. . . . There is a light 
in the old desecrated chapel, the thing that was 
once the temple of Venus, they say, and is now 
Waldemar’s workshop, its broken roof mended 
with reeds and thatch. Waldemar has stolen in, 
no doubt to see his statue again. But he will 
return, more peaceful for the peacefulness of the 
night, to his sleeping wife and children. God 
bless and watch over them 1 Good-night, dearest 
Excellency. 


July 26 . 

I have your Excellency’s telegram in answer to 
mine. Many thanks for- sending the Prince. I 
await his coming with feverish longing ; it is still 
something to look forward to. All does not seem 
over. And yet what can he do ? 

The children are safe : we fetched them out of 
their bed and brought them up here. They are 
still a little shaken by the fire, the bustle, and by 
finding themselves in a strange house ; also, they 
want to know where their mother is ; but they 
have found a tame cat, and I hear them chirping 
on the stairs. 


DION E A. 


IOI 


It was only the roof of the studio, the reeds and 
thatch, that burned, and a few old pieces of timber. 
Waldemar must have set fire to it with great care; 
he had brought armfuls of faggots of dry myrtle 
and heather from the bakehouse close by, and 
thrown into the blaze quantities of pine-cones, and 
of some resin, I know not what, that smelt like 
incense. When we made our way, early this 
morning, through the smouldering studio, we were 
stifled with a hot church-like perfume : my brain 
swam, and I suddenly remembered going into St. 
Peter's on Easter Day as a child. 

It happened last night, while I was writing to 
you. Gertrude had gone to bed, leaving her 
husband in the studio. About eleven the maids 
heard him come out and call to Dionea to get up 
and come and sit to him. He had had this craze 
once before, of seeing her and his statue by an 
artificial light : you remember he had theories 
about the way in which the ancients lit up the 
statues in their temples. Gertrude, the servants 
say, was heard creeping downstairs a little later. 

Do you see it ? I have seen nothing else these 
hours, which have seemed weeks and months. He 
had placed Dionea on the big marble block behind 
the altar, a great curtain of dull red brocade — you 
know that Venetian brocade with the gold pome- 
granate pattern — behind her, like a Madonna of 
Van Eyck's. He showed her to me once before 
like this, the whiteness of her neck and breast, the 


102 


HAUNTINGS. 


whiteness of the drapery round her flanks, toned to 
the colour of old marble by the light of the resin 
burning in pans all round. . . . Before Dionea 
was the altar — the altar of Venus which he had 
borrowed from me. He must have collected all 
the roses about it, and thrown the incense upon 
the embers when Gertrude suddenly entered. And 
then, and then . . . 

We found her lying across the altar, her pale 
hair among the ashes of the incense, her blood — • 
she had but little to give, poor white ghost ! — trick- 
ling among the carved garlands and rams' heads, 
blackening the heaped-up roses. The body of 
Waldemar was found at the foot of the castle cliff. 
Had he hoped, by setting the place on fire, to bury 
himself among its ruins, or had he not rather 
wished to complete in this way the sacrifice, to 
make the whole temple an immense votive pyre ? 
It looked like one, as we hurried down the hills 
to San Massimo : the whole hillside, dry grass, 
myrtle, and heather, all burning, the pale short 
flames waving against the blue moonlit sky, and 
the old fortress outlined black against the blaze. 

August 30. 

Of Dionea I can tell you nothing certain. We 
speak of her as little as we can. Some say they 
have seen her, on stormy nights, wandering among 
the cliffs : but a sailor-boy assures me, by all the 
holy things, that the day after the burning of the 


DION E A. 


103 


Castle Chapel — we never call it anything else — he 
met at dawn, off the island of Palmaria, beyond 
the Strait of Porto Venere, a Greek boat, with eyes 
painted on the prow, going full sail to sea, the 
men singing as she went. And against the mast, 
a robe of purple and gold about her, and a myrtle- 
wreath on her head, leaned Dionea, singing words 
in an unknown tongue, the white pigeons circling 
around her. 






©he of ©fteburst; 

OR, 


THE PHANTOM LOVER . 



. 

- • 

% ' 


. * 


. t 





































































* 







































1 ' 



























To COUNT PETER BOUTOURLINE, 

AT TAGANTCHA , 

GOVERNMENT OF KIEW, RUSSIA. 


My dear Boutourline, — Do you remember my 
telling you, one afternoon that you sat upon the 
hearthstool at Florence, the story of Mrs. Oke of 
Okehurst ? 

You thought it a fantastic tale, you lover of 
fantastic things, and urged me to write it out at 
once, although I protested that, in such matters, 
to write is to exorcise, to dispel the charm ; and 
that printers' ink chases away the ghosts that may 
pleasantly haunt us, as efficaciously as gallons of 
holy water. 

But if, as I suspect, you will now put down 
any charm that story may have possessed to the 
way in which we had been working ourselves up, 
that firelight evening, with all manner of fantastic 
stuff — if, as I fear, the story of Mrs. Oke of Oke- 
hurst will strike you as stale and unprofitable — 
the sight of this little book will serve at least 


io8 


HA UN TINGS. 


to remind you, in the middle of your Russian 
summer, that there is such a season as winter, 
such a place as Florence, and such a person as 
your friend, 


Kensington, July 1886. 


VERNON LEE. 


©fce of ©fceburst; 

OR, 

THE PHANTOM LOVER . 


I. 

That sketch up there with the boy's cap ? Yes ; 
that’s the same woman. I wonder whether you 
could guess who she was. A singular being, is 
she not ? The most marvellous creature, quite, 
that I have ever met : a wonderful elegance, exotic, 
far-fetched, poignant ; an artificial perverse sort of 
grace and research in every outline and movement 
and arrangement of head and neck, and hands and 
fingers. Here are a lot of pencil-sketches I made 
while I was preparing to paint her portrait. Yes ; 
there’s nothing but her in the whole sketch-book. 
Mere scratches, but they may give some idea of 
her marvellous, fantastic kind of grace. Here she 
is leaning over the staircase, and here sitting in 
the swing. Here she is walking quickly out of 
the room. That’s her head. You see she isn’t 
really handsome ; her forehead is too big, and her 
nose too short. This gives no idea of her. It was 

109 


no 


HA UNTINGS. 


altogether a question of movement. Look at the 
strange cheeks, hollow and rather flat ; well, when 
she smiled she had the most marvellous dimples 
here. There was something exquisite and uncanny 
about it. Yes ; I began the picture, but it was 
never finished. I did the husband first. I wonder 
who has his likeness now ? Help me to move 
these pictures away from the wall. Thanks. 
This is her portrait ; a huge wreck. I don’t 
suppose you can make much of it ; it is merely 
blocked in, and seems quite mad. You see my 
idea was to make her leaning against a wall — 
there was one hung with yellow that seemed almost 
brown — so as to bring out the silhouette. 

It was very singular I should have chosen that 
particular wall. It does look rather insane in this 
condition, but I like it ; it has something of her. 
I would frame it and hang it up, only people 
would ask questions. Yes ; you have guessed 
quite right — it is Mrs. Oke of Okehurst. I forgot 
you had relations in that part of the country ; 
besides, I suppose the newspapers were full of it 
at the time. You didn’t know that it all took place 
under my eyes ? I can scarcely believe now that 
it did : it all seems so distant, vivid but unreal, 
like a thing of my own invention. It really was 
much stranger than any ’one guessed. People 
could no more understand it than they could under- 
stand her. I doubt whether any one ever understood 
Alice Oke besides myself. You mustn’t think me 


OKE OF OKEHURST. 


hi 


unfeeling. She was a marvellous, weird, exquisite 
creature, but one couldn't feel sorry for her. I 
felt much sorrier for the wretched creature of a 
husband. It seemed such an appropriate end for 
her ; I fancy she would have liked it could she 
have known. Ah ! I shall never have another 
chance of painting such a portrait as I wanted. 
She seemed sent me from heaven or the other 
place. You have never heard the story in detail ? 
Well, I don't usually mention it, because people 
are so brutally stupid or sentimental ; but I'll tell 
it you. Let me see. It's too dark to paint any 
more to-day, so I can tell it you now. Wait ; I 
must turn her face to the wall. Ah, she was a 
marvellous creature 1 


II. 

You remember, three years ago, my telling you I 
had let myself in for painting a couple of Kentish 
squireen ? I really could not understand what 
had possessed me to say yes to that man. A 
friend of mine had brought him one day to my 
studio — Mr. Oke of Okehurst, that was the name 
on his card. He was a very tall, very well- 
made, very good-looking young man, with a beauti- 
ful fair complexion, beautiful fair moustache, and 
beautifully fitting clothes; absolutely like a hun- 
dred other young men you can see any day in 


I 12 


HAUNTINGS. 


the Park, and absolutely uninteresting from the 
crown of his head to the tip of his boots. Mr. 
Oke, who had been a lieutenant in the Blues 
before his marriage, was evidently extremely un- 
comfortable on finding himself in a studio. He 
felt misgivings about a man who could wear a 
velvet coat in town, but at the same time he was 
nervously anxious not to treat me in the very least 
like a tradesman. He walked round my place, 
looked at everything with the most scrupulous at- 
tention, stammered out a few complimentary phrases, 
and then, looking at his friend for assistance, 
tried to come to the point, but failed. The point, 
which the friend kindly explained, was that Mr. 
Oke was desirous to know whether my engage- 
ments would allow of my painting him and his 
wife, and what my terms would be. The poor 
man blushed perfectly crimson during this explana- 
tion, as if he had come with the most improper 
proposal ; and I noticed — the only interesting thing 
about him — a very odd nervous frown between his 
eyebrows, a perfect double gash, — a thing which 
usually means something abnormal : a mad-doctor of 
my acquaintance calls it the maniac-frown. When 
I had answered, he suddenly burst out into rather 
confused explanations : his wife — Mrs. Oke — had 
seen some of my — pictures — paintings — portraits — 
at the — the — what d’you call it ? — Academy. She 
had — in short, they had made a very great impres- 
sion upon her. Mrs. Oke had a great taste for 


OKE OF OKEHURST. 


113 

art ; she was, in short, extremely desirous of hav- 
ing her portrait and his painted by me, etcetera. 

“ My wife,” he suddenly added, “ is a remark- 
able woman. I don’t know whether you will think 
her handsome, — she isn’t exactly, you know. But 
she’s awfully strange,” and Mr. Oke of Okehurst 
gave a little sigh and frowned that curious frown, 
as if so long a speech and so decided an expression 
of opinion had cost him a great deal. 

It was a rather unfortunate moment in my 
career. A very influential sitter of mine — you 
remember the fat lady with the crimson curtain 
behind her ? — had come to the conclusion or been 
persuaded that I had painted her old and vulgar, 
which, in fact, she was. Her whole clique had 
turned against me, the newspapers had taken up 
the matter, and for the moment I was considered 
as a painter to whose brushes no woman would 
trust her reputation. Things were going badly. 
So I snapped but too gladly at Mr. Oke’s offer, 
and settled to go down to Okehurst at the end 
of a fortnight. But the door had scarcely closed 
upon my future sitter when I began to regret 
my rashness ; and my disgust at the thought 
of wasting a whole summer upon the portrait of 
a totally uninteresting Kentish squire, and his 
doubtless equally uninteresting wife, grew greater 
and greater as the time for execution approached. 

I remember so well the frightful temper in which 
I got into the train for Kent, and the even more 


HA UNTINGS. 


114 

frightful temper in which I got out of it at the 
little station nearest to Okehurst. It was pouring 
floods. I felt a comfortable fury at the thought 
that my canvases would get nicely wetted before 
Mr. Oke’s coachman had packed them on the top 
of the waggonette. It was just what served me 
right for coming to this confounded place to paint 
these confounded people. We drove off in the 
steady downpour. The roads were a mass of yellow 
mud ; the endless flat grazing-grounds under the 
oak-trees, after having been burnt to cinders in 
a long drought, were turned into a hideous brown 
sop ; the country seemed intolerably monotonous. 

My spirits sank lower and lower. I began to 
meditate upon the modern Gothic country-house, 
with the usual amount of Morris furniture, Liberty 
rugs, and Mudie novels, to which I was doubtless 
being taken. My fancy pictured very vividly the 
five or six little Okes — that man certainly must 
have at least five children — the aunts, and sisters- 
in-law, and cousins ; the eternal routine of after- 
noon tea and lawn-tennis ; above all, it pictured Mrs. 
Oke, the bouncing, well - informed, model house- 
keeper, electioneering, charity - organising young 
lady, whom such an individual as Mr. Oke would 
regard in the light of a remarkable woman. And 
my spirit sank within me, and I cursed my 
avarice in accepting the commission, my spirit- 
lessness in not throwing it over while yet there 
was time. We had meanwhile driven into a large 


OKE OF OKEHURST. 


ll 5 

park, or rather a long succession of grazing-grounds, 
dotted about with large oaks, under which the 
sheep were huddled together for shelter from the 
rain. In the distance, blurred by the sheets of 
rain, was a line of low hills, with a jagged fringe 
of bluish firs and a solitary windmill. It must be 
a good mile and a half since we had passed a 
house, and there was none to be seen in the 
distance — nothing but the undulation of sere grass, 
sopped brown beneath the huge blackish oak-trees, 
and whence arose, from all sides, a vague discon- 
solate bleating. At last the road made a sudden 
bend, and disclosed what was evidently the home of 
my sitter. It was not what I had expected. In a 
dip in the ground a large red-brick house, with the 
rounded gables and high chimney-stacks of the 
time of James I., — a forlorn, vast place, set in the 
midst of the pasture-land, with no trace of garden 
before it, and only a few large trees indicating the 
possibility of one to the back; no lawn either, 
but on the other side of the sandy dip, which 
suggested a filled-up moat, a huge oak, short, 
hollow, with wreathing, blasted, black branches, 
upon which only a handful of leaves shook in 
the rain. It was not at all what I had pictured 
to myself the home of Mr. Oke of Okehurst. 

My host received me in the hall, a large place, 
panelled and carved, hung round with portraits 
up to its curious ceiling — vaulted and ribbed like 
the inside of a ship's hull. He looked even more 


ii6 


HA UNTINGS. 


blond and pink and white, more absolutely mediocre 
in his tweed suit ; and also, I thought, even more 
good-natured and duller. He took me into his 
study, a room hung round with whips and fishing- 
tackle in place of books, while my things were being 
carried upstairs. It was very damp, and a fire 
was smouldering. He gave the embers a nervous 
kick with his foot, and said, as he offered me a 
cigar— 

*You must excuse my not introducing you at 
once to Mrs. Oke. My wife — in short, I believe 
my wife is asleep.” 

“ Is Mrs. Oke unwell ? ” I asked, a sudden hope 
flashing across me that I might be off the whole 
matter. 

“ Oh no ! Alice is quite well ; at least, quite 
as well as she usually is. My wife,” he added, 
after a minute, and in a very decided tone, “does 
not enjoy very good health — a nervous constitu- 
tion. Oh no ! not at all ill, nothing at all serious, 
you know. Only nervous, the doctors say; mustn’t 
be worried or excited, the doctors say ; requires 
lots of repose, — that sort of thing.” 

There was a dead pause. This man depressed 
me, I knew not why. He had a listless, puzzled 
look, very much out of keeping with his evident 
admirable health and strength. 

“ I suppose you are a great sportsman ? ” I 
asked from sheer despair, nodding in the direc- 
tion of the whips and guns and fishing-rods. 


OKE OF OKEHURST. 


117 

u Oh no ! not now. I was once. I have given 
up all that/' he answered, standing with his back 
to the fire, and staring at the polar bear beneath his 
feet. “ I — I have no time for all that now,” he 
added, as if an explanation were due. 11 A married 
man — you know. Would you like to come up to 
your rooms ? ” he suddenly interrupted himself. “ I 
have had one arranged for you to paint in. My 
wife said you would prefer a north light. If 
that one doesn’t suit, you can have your choice of 
any other." 

I followed him out of the study, through the 
vast entrance-hall. In less than a minute I was 
no longer thinking of Mr. and Mrs. Oke and the 
boredom of doing their likeness ; 1 was simply 
overcome by the beauty of this house, which I 
had pictured modern and philistine. It was, with- 
out exception, the most perfect example of an old 
English manor-house that I had ever seen ; the 
most magnificent intrinsically, and the most admir- 
ably preserved. Out of the huge hall, with its 
immense fireplace of delicately carved and inlaid 
grey and black stone, and its rows of family 
portraits, reaching from the wainscoting to the 
oaken ceiling, vaulted and ribbed like a ship’s hull, 
opened the wide, flat-stepped staircase, the parapet 
surmounted at intervals by heraldic monsters, the 
wall covered with oak carvings of coats-of-arms, 
leafage, and little mythological scenes, painted a 
faded red and blue, and picked out with tarnished 


n8 


HA UNTINGS. 


gold, which harmonised with the tarnished blue 
and gold of the stamped leather that reached to 
the oak cornice, again delicately tinted and gilded. 
The beautifully damascened suits of court armour 
looked, without being at all rusty, as if no modern 
hand had ever touched them ; the very rugs under 
foot were of sixteenth-century Persian make ; the 
only things of to-day were the big bunches of 
flowers and ferns, arranged in majolica dishes upon 
the landings. Everything was perfectly silent ; only 
from below came the chimes, silvery like an Italian 
palace fountain, of an old-fashioned clock. 

It seemed to me that I was being led through 
the palace of the Sleeping Beauty. 

“ What a magnificent house ! ” I exclaimed as 
I followed my host through a long corridor, also 
hung with leather, wainscoted with carvings, and 
furnished with big wedding coffers, and chairs that 
looked as if they came out of some Vandyck portrait. 
In my mind was the strong impression that all this 
was natural, spontaneous — that it had about it 
nothing of the picturesqueness which swell studios 
have taught to rich and aesthetic houses. Mr. Oke 
misunderstood me. 

“ It is a nice old place,” he said, “ but it’s too 
large for us. You see, my wife’s health does not 
allow of our having many guests; and there are 
no children.” 

I thought I noticed a vague complaint in his 
voice ; and he evidently was afraid there might 


OKE OF OKEHURST. 


119 

have seemed something of the kind, for he added 
immediately — 

“ I don’t care for children one jackstraw, you 
know, myself ; can’t understand how any one can, 
for my part.” 

If ever a man went out of his way to tell a lie, 
I said to myself, Mr. Oke of Okehurst was doing 
so at the present moment. 

When he had left me in one of the two enor- 
mous rooms that were allotted to me, I threw 
myself into an arm-chair and tried to focus the 
extraordinary imaginative impression which this 
house had given me. 

I am very susceptible to such impressions ; and 
besides the sort of spasm of imaginative interest 
sometimes given to me by certain rare and eccentric 
personalities, I know nothing more subduing than 
the charm, quieter and less analytic, of any sort of 
complete and out-of-the-common-run sort of house. 
To sit in a room like the one I was sitting in, with 
the figures of the tapestry glimmering grey and 
lilac and purple in the twilight, the great bed, 
columned and curtained, looming in the middle, 
and the embers reddening beneath the overhanging 
mantelpiece of inlaid Italian stonework, a vague 
scent of rose-leaves and spices, put into the china 
bowls by the hands of ladies long since dead, 
while the clock downstairs sent up, every now 
and then, its faint silvery tune of forgotten days, 
filled the room; — to do this is a special kind of 


120 


HA UNTINGS. 


voluptuousness, peculiar and complex and inde- 
scribable, like the half-drunkenness of opium or 
haschisch, and which, to be conveyed to others in 
any sense as I feel it, would require a genius, 
subtle and heady, like that of Baudelaire. 

After I had dressed for dinner I resumed my 
place in the arm-chair, and resumed also my 
reverie, letting all these impressions of the past 
— which seemed faded like the figures in the 
arras, but still warm like the embers in the fire- 
place, still sweet and subtle like the perfume of 
the dead rose-leaves and broken spices in the 
china bowls — permeate me and go to my head. 
Of Oke and Oke's wife I did not think ; I seemed 
quite alone, isolated from the world, separated 
from it in this exotic enjoyment. 

Gradually the embers grew paler ; the figures 
in the tapestry more shadowy ; the columned and 
curtained bed loomed out vaguer ; the room seemed 
to fill with greyness ; and my eyes wandered to 
the mullioned bow-window, beyond whose panes, 
between whose heavy stone- work, stretched a 
greyish-brown expanse of sere and sodden park 
grass, dotted with big oaks ; while far off, behind a 
jagged fringe of dark Scotch firs, the wet sky was 
suffused with the blood-red of the sunset. Between 
the falling of the raindrops from the ivy outside, 
there came, fainter or sharper, the recurring bleat- 
ing of the lambs separated from their mothers, a 
forlorn, quavering, eerie little cry. 


OKE OF OKEHURST. 


121 


I started up at a sudden rap at my door. 

“ Haven’t you heard the gong for dinner ? ” 
asked Mr. Oke’s voice. 

I had completely forgotten his existence. 


Ill 

I feel that I cannot possibly reconstruct my earliest 
impressions of Mrs. Oke. My recollection of them 
would be entirely coloured by my subsequent 
knowledge of her ; whence I conclude that I could 
not at first have experienced the strange interest 
and admiration which that extraordinary woman 
very soon excited in me. Interest and admiration, 
be it well understood, of a very unusual kind, as 
she was herself a very unusual kind of woman ; 
and I, if you choose, am a rather unusual kind of 
man. But I can explain that better anon. 

This much is certain, that I must have been 
immeasurably surprised at finding my hostess and 
future sitter so completely unlike everything I had 
anticipated. Or no — now I come to think of it, 
I scarcely felt surprised at all; or if I did, that 
shock of surprise could have lasted but an in- 
finitesimal part of a minute. The fact is, that, 
having once seen Alice Oke in the reality, it was 
quite impossible to remember that one could have 
fancied her at all different : there was something 
so complete, so completely unMke every one else, 


122 


HA UNTINGS. 


in her personality, that she seemed always to have 
been present in one’s consciousness, although pre- 
sent, perhaps, as an enigma. 

Let me try and give you some notion of her : 
not that first impression, whatever it may have 
been, but the absolute reality of her as I gradu- 
ally learned to see it. To begin with, I must 
repeat and reiterate over and over again, that she 
was, beyond all comparison, the most graceful 
and exquisite woman I have ever seen, but with 
a grace and an exquisiteness that had nothing to 
do with any preconceived notion or previous ex- 
perience of what goes by these names : grace and 
exquisiteness recognised at once as perfect, but 
which were seen in her for the first, and pro- 
bably, I do believe, for the last time. It is con- 
ceivable, is it not, that once in a thousand years 
there may arise a combination of lines, a system 
of movements, an outline, a gesture, which is new, 
unprecedented, and yet hits off exactly our desires 
for beauty and rareness ? She was very tall ; 
and I suppose people would have called her thin. 
I don’t know, for I never thought about her as a 
body — bones, flesh, that sort of thing ; but merely 
as a wonderful series of lines, and a wonderful 
strangeness of personality. Tall and slender, 
certainly, and with not one item of what makes 
up our notion of a well-built woman. She was 
as straight — I mean she had as little of what 
people call figure; — as a bamboo ; her shoulders 


OKE OF OKEHURST. 


123 


were a trifle high, and she had a decided stoop; 
her arms and her shoulders she never once wore 
uncovered. But this bamboo figure of hers had 
a suppleness and a stateliness, a play of outline 
with every step she took, that I can’t compare to 
anything else ; there was in it something of the 
peacock and something also of the stag ; but, above 
all, it was her own. I wish I could describe her. 
I wish, alas ! — I wish, I wish, I have wished a 
hundred thousand times — I could paint her, as I see 
her now, if I shut my eyes — even if it were only a 
silhouette. There ! I see her so plainly, walking 
slowly up and down a room, the slight highness 
of her shoulders just completing the exquisite 
arrangement of lines made by the straight supple 
back, the long exquisite neck, the head, with the 
hair cropped in short pale curls, always drooping 
a little, except when she would suddenly throw it 
back, and smile, not at me, nor at any one, nor 
at anything that had been said, but as if she 
alone had suddenly seen or heard something, with 
the strange dimple in her thin, pale cheeks, and 
the strange whiteness in her full, wide-opened eyes : 
the moment when she had something of the stag 
in her movement. But where is the use of talking 
about her ? I don't believe, you know, that even 
the greatest painter can show what is the real 
beauty of a very beautiful woman in the ordinary 
sense : Titian’s and Tintoretto’s women must have 
been miles handsomer than they have made them. 


124 


HA UNTINGS. 


Something — and that the very essence — always 
escapes, perhaps because real beauty is as much a 
thing in time — a thing like music, a succession, 
a series— as in space. Mind you, I am speaking 
of a woman beautiful in the conventional sense. 
Itnagine, then, how much more so in the case of 
a woman like Alice Oke ; and if the pencil and 
brush, imitating each line and tint, can't succeed, 
how is it possible to give even the vaguest notion 
with mere wretched words — words possessing only 
a wretched abstract meaning, an impotent con- 
ventional association ? To make a long story 
short, Mrs. Oke of Okehurst was, in my opinion, 
to th.e highest degree exquisite and strange, ^an 
exotic creature, whose charm you can no more 
describe than you could bring home the perfume 
of some newly discovered tropical flower by com- 
paring it with the scent of a cabbage-rose or a 
lily. 

That first dinner was gloomy enough. Mr. Oke 
— Oke of Okehurst, as the people down there called 
him — was horribly shy, consumed with a fear of 
making a fool of himself before me and his wife, 
I then thought. But that sort of shyness did not 
wear off ; and I soon discovered that, although it 
was doubtless increased by the presence of a total 
stranger, it was inspired in Oke, not by me, but 
by his wife. He would look every now and then 
as if he were going to make a remark, and then 
evidently restrain himself, and remain silent. It 


OKE OF OKEHURST. 


125 


was very curious to see this big, handsome, manly 
young fellow, who ought to have had any amount 
of success with women, suddenly stammer and 
grow crimson in the presence of his own wife. 
Nor was it the consciousness of stupidity ; for 
when you got him alone, Oke, although always 
slow and timid, had a certain amount of ideas, 
and very defined political and social views, and a 
certain childlike earnestness and desire to attain 
certainty and truth which was rather touching. On 
the other hand, Oke's singular shyness was not, so 
far as I could see, the result of any kind of bully- 
ing on his wife's part. You can always detect, 
if you have any observation, the husband or the 
wife who is accustomed to be snubbed, to be 
corrected, by his or her better-half : there is a self- 
consciousness in both parties, a habit of watching 
and fault-finding, of being watched and found fault 
with. This was clearly not the case at Okehurst. 
Mrs. Oke evidently did not trouble herself about 
her husband in the very least ; he might say or 
do any amount of silly things without rebuke or 
even notice ; and he might have done so, had he 
chosen,, ever since his wedding-day. You felt 
that at once. Mrs. Oke simply passed over his 
existence. I cannot say she paid much attention 
to any one's, even to mine. At first I thought it 
an affectation on her part — for there was some- 
thing far-fetched in her whole appearance, some- 
thing suggesting study, which might lead one to 


126 


HA UN TINGS. 


tax her with affectation at first ; she was dressed 
in a strange way, not according to any established 
aesthetic eccentricity, but individually, strangely, 
as if in the clothes of an ancestress of the seven- 
teenth century. Well, at first I thought it a kind 
of pose on her part, this mixture of extreme 
graciousness and utter indifference which she 
manifested towards me. She always seemed to 
be thinking of something else ; and although she 
talked quite sufficiently, and with every sign of 
superior intelligence, she left the impression of 
having been as taciturn as her husband. 

In the beginning, in the first few days of my 
stay at Okehurst, I imagined that Mrs. Oke was 
a highly superior sort of flirt ; and that her absent 
manner, her look, while speaking to you, into an 
invisible distance, her curious irrelevant smile, 
were so many means of attracting and baffling 
adoration. I mistook it for the somewhat similar 
manners of certain foreign women — it is beyond 
English ones — which mean, to those who can 
understand, “ pay court to me.” But I soon 
found I was mistaken. Mrs. Oke had not the 
faintest desire that I should pay court to her ; 
indeed she did not honour me with sufficient 
thought for that ; and I, on my part, began to be 
too much interested in her from another point 
of view to dream of such a thing. I became 
aware, not merely that I had before me the most 
marvellously rare and exquisite and baffling sub- 


OKE OF OKEHURST. 


127 


ject lor a portrait, but also one of the most 
peculiar and enigmatic of characters. Now that 
I look back upon it, I am tempted to think that 
the psychological peculiarity of that woman might 
be summed up in an exorbitant and absorbing 
interest in herself — a Narcissus attitude — curiously 
complicated with a fantastic imagination, a sort 
of morbid day-dreaming, all turned inwards, and 
with no outer characteristic save a certain restless- 
ness, a perverse desire to surprise and shock, to 
surprise and shock more particularly her husband, 
and thus be revenged for the intense boredom 
which his want of appreciation inflicted upon her. 

I got to understand this much little by little, 
yet I did not seem to have really penetrated the 
something mysterious about Mrs. Oke. There was 
a waywardness, a strangeness, which I felt but 
could not explain — a something as difficult to 
define as the peculiarity of her outward appear- 
ance, and perhaps very closely connected there- 
with. I became interested in Mrs. Oke as if I 
had been in love with her ; and I was not in the 
least in love. I neither dreaded parting from her, 
nor felt any pleasure in her presence. I had not 
the smallest wish to please or to gain her notice. 
But I had her on the brain. I pursued her, her 
physical image, her psychological explanation, with 
a kind of passion which filled my days, and pre- 
vented my ever feeling dull. The Okes lived a 
remarkably solitary life. There were but few 


128 


HA UNTINGS. 


neighbours, of whom they saw but little ; and 
they rarely had a guest in the house. Oke him- 
self seemed every now and then seized with a 
sense of responsibility towards me. He would 
remark vaguely, during our walks and after-dinner 
chats, that I must find life at Okehurst horribly 
dull ; his wife’s health had accustomed him to 
solitude, and then also his wife thought the neigh- 
bours a bore. He never questioned his wife’s 
judgment in these matters. He merely stated the 
case as if resignation were quite simple and in- 
evitable ; yet it seemed to me, sometimes, that 
this monotonous life of solitude, by the side of a 
woman who took no more heed of him than of a 
table or chair, was producing a vague depression 
and irritation in this young man, so evidently 
cut out for a cheerful, commonplace life. I often 
wondered how he could endure it at all, not having, 
as I had, the interest of a strange psychological 
riddle to solve, and of a great portrait to paint. 
He was, I found, extremely good, — the type of 
the perfectly conscientious young Englishman, the 
sort of man who ought to have been the Christian 
soldier kind of thing ; devout, pure-minded, brave, 
incapable of any baseness, a little intellectually 
dense, and puzzled by all manner of moral scruples. 
The condition of his tenants and of his political 
party — he was a regular Kentish Tory — lay heavy 
on his mind. He spent hours every day in his 
study, doing the work of a land agent and a politi- 


OKE OF OKEHURST. 


129 


cal whip, reading piles of reports and newspapers 
and agricultural treatises ; and 'emerging for lunch 
with piles of letters in his hand, and that odd 
puzzled look in his good healthy face, that deep 
gash between his eyebrows, which my friend the 
mad-doctor calls the maniac-frown. It was with 
this expression of face that I should have liked 
to paint him ; but I felt that he would not have 
liked it, that it was more fair to him to repre- 
sent him in his mere wholesome pink and white 
and blond conventionality. I was perhaps rather 
unconscientious about the likeness of Mr. Oke ; 
I felt satisfied to paint it no matter how, I mean 
as regards character, for my whole mind was 
swallowed up in thinking how I should paint Mrs. 
Oke, how I could best transport on to canvas that 
singular and enigmatic personality. I began with 
her husband, and told her frankly that I must 
have much longer to study her. Mr. Oke couldn’t 
understand why it should be necessary to make a 
hundred and one pencil-sketches of his wife before 
even determining in what attitude to paint her; 
but I think he was rather pleased to have an 
opportunity of keeping me at Okehurst ; my pre- 
sence evidently broke the monotony of his life. 
Mrs. Oke seemed perfectly indifferent to my stay- 
ing, as she was perfectly indifferent to my presence. 
Without being rude, I never saw a woman pay 
so little attention to a guest ; she would talk with 
me sometimes by the hour, or rather let me talk 

1 


i3° 


HAUNTINGS. 


to her, but she never seemed to be listening. She 
would lie back in a big seventeenth-century arm- 
chair while I played the piano, with that strange 
smile every now and then in her thin cheeks, that 
strange whiteness in her eyes ; but it seemed a 
matter of indifference whether my music stopped 
or went on. In my portrait of her husband she 
did not take, or pretend to take, the very faintest 
interest ; but that was nothing to me. I did not 
want Mrs. Oke to think me interesting; I merely 
wished to go on studying her. 

The first time that Mrs. Oke seemed to become 
at all aware of my presence as distinguished from 
that of the chairs and tables, the dogs that lay in 
the porch, or the clergyman or lawyer or stray 
neighbour who was occasionally asked to dinner, 
was one day — I might have been there a week — 
when I chanced to remark to her upon the very 
singular resemblance that existed between herself 
and the portrait of a lady that hung in the hall 
with the ceiling like a ship’s hull. The picture 
in question was a full length, neither very good 
nor very bad, probably done by some stra}' Italian 
of the early seventeenth century. It hung in a 
rather dark corner, facing the portrait, evidently 
painted to be its companion, of a dark man, with 
a somewhat unpleasant expression of resolution 
and efficiency, in a black Vandyck dress. The 
two were evidently man and wife; and in the 
corner of the woman’s portrait were the words, 


OKE OF OKEHURST. 


X 3 T 

11 Alice Oke, daughter of Virgil Pomfret, Esq., and 
wife to Nicholas Oke of Okehurst,” and the date 
1626 — “ Nicholas Oke” being the name painted in 
the corner of the small portrait. The lady was really 
wonderfully like the present Mrs. Oke, at least 
so far as an indifferently painted portrait of the 
early days of Charles I. can be like a living woman 
of the nineteenth century. There were the same 
strange lines of figure and face, the same dimples 
in the thin cheeks, the same wide-opened eyes, 
the same vague eccentricity of expression, not 
destroyed even by the feeble painting and con- 
ventional manner of the time. One could fancy 
that this woman had the same walk, the same 
beautiful line of nape of the neck and stooping 
head as her descendant ; for I found that Mr. and 
Mrs. Oke, who were first cousins, were both de- 
scended from that Nicholas Oke and that Alice, 
daughter of Virgil Pomfret. But the resemblance 
was heightened by the fact that, as I soon 
saw, the present Mrs. Oke distinctly made her- 
self up to look like her ancestress, dressing in 
garments that had a seventeenth -century look; 
nay, that were sometimes absolutely copied from 
this portrait. 

11 You think I am like her,” answered Mrs. Oke 
dreamily to my remark, and her eyes wandered 
off to that unseen something, and the faint smile 
dimpled her thin cheeks. 

“ You are like her, and you know it. I may 


I3 2 


HA UNTINGS. 


even say you wish to be like her, Mrs. Oke,” I 
answered, laughing. 

“ Perhaps I do.” 

And she looked in the direction of her husband. 
I noticed that he had an expression of distinct 
annoyance besides that frown of his. 

“ Isn’t it true that Mrs. Oke tries to look like 
that portrait ? ” I asked, with a perverse curiosity. 

“ Oh, fudge ! ” he exclaimed, rising from his 
chair and walking nervously to the window. “ It’s 
all nonsense, mere nonsense. I wish you wouldn’t, 
Alice.” 

“ Wouldn’t what ? ” asked Mrs. Oke, with a sort 
of contemptuous indifference. “If I am like that 
Alice Oke, why I am ; and I am very pleased any 
one should think so. She and her husband are 
just about the only two members of our family — 
our most flat, stale, and unprofitable family — that 
ever were in the least degree interesting.” 

Oke grew crimson, and frowned as if in pain. 

“ I don’t see why you should abuse our family, 
Alice,” he said. 11 Thank God, our people have 
always been honourable and upright men and 
women ! ” 

“ Excepting always Nicholas Oke and Alice 
his wife, daughter of Virgil Pomfret, Esq.,” she an- 
swered, laughing, as he strode out into the park. 

“ How childish he is ! ” she exclaimed when we 
were alone. “ He really minds, really feels dis- 
graced by what our ancestors did two centuries 


OKE OF OKE HURST. 


133 


and a half ago. I do believe William would have 
those two portraits taken down and burned if he 
weren’t afraid of me and ashamed of the neighbours. 
And as it is, these two people really are the only two 
members of our family that ever were in the least 
interesting. I will tell you the story some day.” 

As it was, the story was told to me by Oke 
himself. The next day, as we were taking our 
morning walk, he suddenly broke a long silence, 
laying about him all the time at the sere grasses 
with the hooked stick that he carried, like the 
conscientious Kentishman he was, for the purpose 
of cutting down his and other folk’s thistles. 

** I fear you must have thought me very ill- 
mannered towards my wife yesterday,” he said 
shyly ; “ and indeed I know I was.” 

Oke was one of those chivalrous beings to whom 
every woman, every wife — and his own most of 
all — appeared in the light of something holy. 
11 But — but — I have a prejudice which my wife 
does not enter into, about raking up ugly things 
in one’s own family. I suppose Alice thinks that 
it is so long ago that it has really got no connec- 
tion with us ; she thinks of it merely as a pic- 
turesque story. I daresay many people feel like 
that ; in short, I am sure they do, otherwise there 
wouldn’t be such lots of discreditable family tra- 
ditions afloat. But I feel as if it -were all one 
whether it was long ago or not; when it's a 
question of one’s own people, I would rather have 


134 


HA UNTINGS. 


it forgotten. I can’t understand how people can 
talk about murders in their families, and ghosts, 
and so forth.” 

“ Have you any ghosts at Okehurst, by the 
way ? ” I asked. The place seemed as if it re- 
quired some to complete it. 

“ I hope not,” answered Oke gravely. 

His gravity made me smile. 

“ Why, would you dislike it if there were ? ” I 
asked. 

“ If there are such things as ghosts,” he replied, 
“ I don’t think they should be taken lightly. God 
would not permit them to be, except as a warning 
or a punishment.” 

We walked on some time in silence, I wonder- 
ing at the strange type of this commonplace young 
man, and half wishing I could put something into 
my portrait that should be the equivalent of this 
curious unimaginative earnestness. Then Oke 
told me the story of those two pictures — told it 
me about as badly and hesitatingly as was possible 
for mortal man. 

He and his wife were, as I have said, cousins, 
and therefore descended from the same old Kentish 
stock. The Okes of Okehurst could trace back 
to Norman, almost to Saxon times, far longer than 
any of the titled or better-known families of the 
neighbourhood. I saw that William Oke, in his 
heart, thoroughly looked down upon all his neigh- 
bours. “ We have never done anything particular, 


OKE OF OKEHURST. 


*35 


or been anything particular — never held any office/’ 
he said; “but we have always been here, and 
apparently always done our duty. An ancestor of 
ours was killed in the Scotch wars, another at 
Agincourt — mere honest captains.” Well, early 
in the seventeenth century, the family had dwindled 
to a single member, Nicholas Oke, the same who 
had rebuilt Okehurst in its present shape. This 
Nicholas appears to have been somewhat different 
from the usual run of the family. He had, in his 
youth, sought adventures in America, and seems, 
generally speaking, to have been less of a nonentity 
than his ancestors. He married, when no longer 
very young, Alice, daughter of Virgil Pomfret, 
a beautiful young heiress from a neighbouring 
county. “ It was the first time an Oke married 
a Pomfret,” my host informed me, “ and the last 
time. The Pomfrets were quite different sort of 
people — restless, self-seeking ; one of them had 
been a favourite of Henry VIII.” It was clear 
that William Oke had no feeling of having any 
Pomfret blood in his veins ; he spoke of these 
people with an evident family dislike — the dislike of 
an Oke, one of the old, honourable, modest stock, 
which had quietly done its duty, for a family of 
fortune-seekers and Court minions. Well, there 
had come to live near Okehurst, in a little house 
recently inherited from an uncle, a certain Chris- 
topher Lovelock, a young gallant and poet, who 
was in momentary disgrace at Court for some 


136 


HA UNTINGS. 


love affair. This Lovelock had struck up a great 
friendship with his neighbours of Okehurst — too 
great a friendship, apparently, with the wife, either 
for her husband's taste or her own. Anyhow, one 
evening as he was riding home alone, Lovelock 
had been attacked and murdered, ostensibly by 
highwaymen, but as was afterwards rumoured, by 
Nicholas Oke, accompanied by his wife dressed as 
a groom. No legal evidence had been got, but 
the tradition had remained. “They used to tell 
it us when we were children," said my host, in a 
hoarse voice, “ and to frighten my cousin — I mean 
my wife — and me with stories about Lovelock. 
It is merely a tradition, which I hope may die out, 
as I sincerely pray to heaven that it may be false.” 
“Alice — Mrs. Oke — you see," he went on after 
some time, “ doesn't feel about it as I do. Perhaps 
I am morbid. But I do dislike having the old 
story raked up." 

And we said no more on the subject. 


III. 

From that moment I began to assume a certain 
interest in the eyes of Mrs. Oke ; or rather, I 
began to perceive that I had a means of securing 
her attention. Perhaps it was wrong of me to 
do so ; and I have often reproached myself very 
seriously later on. But after all, how was I tc 


OKE OF OKEHURST. 


137 


guess that I was making mischief merely by chim- 
ing in, for the sake of the portrait I had under- 
taken, and of a very harmless psychological mania, 
with what was merely the fad, the little romantic 
affectation or eccentricity, of a scatter-brained and 
eccentric young woman ? How in the world should 
I have dreamed that I was handling explosive 
substances ? A man is surely not responsible if 
the people with whom he is forced to deal, and 
whom he deals with as with all the rest of the 
world, are quite different from all other human 
creatures. 

So, if indeed I did at all conduce to mischief, 
I really cannot blame myself. I had met in Mrs. 
Oke an almost unique subject for a portrait-painter 
of my particular sort, and a most singular, bizarre 
personality. I could not possibly do my subject jus- 
tice so long as I was kept at a distance, prevented 
from studying the real character of the woman. 
I required to put her into play. And I ask you 
whether any more innocent way of doing so could 
be found than talking to a woman, and letting her 
talk, about an absurd fancy she had for a couple 
of ancestors of hers of the time of Charles I., and 
a poet whom they had murdered ? — particularly as 
I studiously respected the prejudices of my host, 
and refrained from mentioning the matter, and 
tried to restrain Mrs. Oke from doing so, in the 
presence of William Oke himself. 

I had certainly guessed correctly. To resemble 


138 


HA UNTINGS. 


the Alice Oke of the year 1626 was the caprice, 
the mania, the pose, the whatever you may call 
it, of the Alice Oke of 1880; and to perceive this 
resemblance was the sure way of gaining her good 
graces. It was the most extraordinary craze, of 
all the extraordinary crazes of childless and idle 
women, that I had ever met; but it was more 
than that, it was admirably characteristic. It 
finished off the strange figure of Mrs. Oke, as I 
saw it in my imagination — this bizarre creature 
of enigmatic, far-fetched exquisiteness — that she 
should have no interest in the present, but only 
an eccentric passion in the past. It seemed to 
give the meaning to the absent look in her eyes, 
to her irrelevant and far-off smile. It was like 
the words to a weird piece of gipsy music, this 
that she, who was so different, so distant from all 
women of her own time, should try and identify 
herself with a woman of the past — that she should 
have a kind of flirtation But of this anon. 

I told Mrs. Oke that I had learnt from her 
husband the outline of the tragedy, or mystery, 
whichever it was, of Alice Oke, daughter of Virgil 
Pomfret, and the poet Christopher Lovelock. That 
look of vague contempt, of a desire to shock, which 
I had noticed before, came into her beautiful, pale, 
diaphanous face. 

“ I suppose my husband was very shocked at 
the whole matter,” she said — “ told it you with 
as little detail as possible, and assured you very 


OKE OF OKEHURST. 


139 


solemnly that he hoped the whole story might be 
a mere dreadful calumny ? Poor Willie ! I re- 
member already when we were children, and I 
used to come with my mother to spend Christmas 
at Okehurst, and my cousin was down here for his 
holidays, how I used to horrify him by insisting 
upon dressing up in shawls and waterproofs, and 
playing the story of the wicked Mrs. Oke ; and he 
always piously refused to do the part of Nicholas, 
when I wanted to have the scene on Cotes Common. 
I didn't know then that I was like the original 
Alice Oke ; I found it out only after our marriage. 
You really think that I am?” 

She certainly was, particularly at that moment, 
as she stood in a white Vandyck dress, with the 
green of the park-land rising up behind her, and 
the low sun catching her short locks and surround- 
ing her head, her exquisitely bowed head, with a 
pale-yellow halo. But I confess I thought the 
original Alice Oke, siren and murderess though 
she might be, very uninteresting compared with 
this wayward and exquisite creature whom I had 
rashly promised myself to send down to posterity 
in all her unlikely wayward exquisiteness. 

One morning while Mr. Oke was despatching his 
Saturday heap of Conservative manifestoes and 
rural decisions — he was justice of the peace in a 
most literal sense, penetrating into cottages and 
huts, defending the weak and admonishing the 
ill-conducted — one morning while I was making 


140 


HA UNTINGS. 


one of my many pencil-sketches (alas, they are all 
that remain to me now !) of my future sitter, Mrs. 
Oke gave me her version of the story of Alice 
Oke and Christopher Lovelock. 

“ Do you suppose there was anything between 
them ? ” I asked — “ that she was ever in love with 
him ? How do you explain the part which tradi- 
tion ascribes to her in the supposed murder ? One 
has heard of women and their lovers who have 
killed the husband ; but a woman who combines 
with her husband to kill her lover, or at least the 
man who is in love with her — that is surely very 
singular.” I was absorbed in my drawing, and 
really thinking very little of what I was saying. 

“ I don’t know,” she answered pensively, with 
that distant look in her* eyes. “ Alice Oke was 
very proud, I am sure. She may have loved the 
poet very much, and yet been indignant with him, 
hated having to love him. She may have felt 
that she had a right to rid herself of him, and to 
call upon her husband to help her to do so.” 

“ Good heavens ! what a fearful idea ! ” I ex- 
claimed, half laughing. “ Don’t you think, after 
all, that Mr. Oke may be right in ' saying that it 
is easier and more comfortable to take the whole 
story as a pure invention ? ” 

“ I cannot take it as an invention,” answered 
Mrs. Oke contemptuously, “ because I happen to 
know that it is true.” 

“ Indeed ! ” I answered, working away at my 


OKE OF OKEHURST. 


141 

sketch, and enjoying putting this strange creature, 
as I said to myself, through her paces ; “ how is 
that ? ” 

" How does one know that anything is true 
in this world ? ” she replied evasively ; “ because 
one does, because one feels it to be true, I sup- 
pose.” 

And, with that far-off look in her light eyes, 
she relapsed into silence. 

“ Have you ever read any of Lovelock’s poetry ? ” 
she asked me suddenly the next day. 

“ Lovelock ? ” I answered, for I had forgotten 

the name. “ Lovelock, who ” But I stopped, 

remembering the prejudices of my host, who was 
seated next to me at table. 

“ Lovelock who was killed by Mr. Oke’s and 
my ancestors.” 

And she looked full at her husband, as if in 
perverse enjoyment of the evident annoyance which 
it caused him. 

il Alice,” he entreated in a low voice, his whole 
face crimson, 11 for mercy’s sake, don’t talk about 
such things before the servants.” 

Mrs. Oke burst into a high, light, rather hys- 
terical laugh, the laugh of a naughty child. 

“ The servants ! Gracious heavens ! do you 
suppose they haven’t heard the story ? Why, it's 
as well known as Okehurst itself in the neighbour- 
hood. Don’t they believe that Lovelock has been 
seen about the house? Haven't they all heard 


142 


HA UN TINGS. 


his footsteps in the big corridor ? Haven't they k 
my dear Willie, noticed a thousand times that 
you never will stay a minute alone in the yellow 
drawing-room — that you run out of it, like a child, 
if I happen to leave you there for a minute ? ” 

True ! How was it I had not noticed that ? 
or rather, that I only now remembered having 
noticed it ? The yellow drawing-room was one 
of the most charming rooms in the house : a 
large, bright room, hung with yellow damask and 
panelled with carvings, that opened straight out on 
to the lawn, far superior to the room in which we 
habitually sat, which was comparatively gloomy. 
This time Mr. Oke struck me as really too childish. 
I felt an intense desire to badger him. 

“ The yellow drawing-room!” I exclaimed. 
u Does this interesting literary character haunt 
the yellow drawing-room? Do tell me about 
it. What happened there ? ” 

Mr. Oke made a painful effort to laugh. 

“ Nothing ever happened there, so far as I 
know,” he said, and rose from the table. 

“ Really ? ” I asked incredulously. 

“ Nothing did happen there,” answered Mrs. 
Oke slowly, playing mechanically with a fork, and 
picking out the pattern of the tablecloth. “ That 
is just the extraordinary circumstance, that, so far 
as any one knows, nothing ever did happen there ; 
and yet that room has an evil reputation. No 
member of our family, they say, can bear to sit 


OKE OF OKEHURST. 


143 

there alone for more than a minute. You see, 
William evidently cannot.” 

“ Have you ever seen or heard anything strange 
there ? ” I asked of my host. 

He shook his head. “ Nothing,” he answered 
curtly, and lit his cigar. 

“ I presume you have not,” I asked, half laugh- 
ing, of Mrs. Oke, “ since you don't mind sitting in 
that room for hours alone ? How do you explain 
this uncanny reputation, since nothing ever hap- 
pened there ? ” 

“ Perhaps something is destined to happen there 
in the future,” she answered, in her absent voice. 
And then she suddenly added, “ Suppose you 
paint my portrait in that room ? ” 

Mr. Oke suddenly turned round. He was very 
white, and looked as if he were going to say 
something, but desisted. 

“ Why do you worry Mr. Oke like that ? ” I 
asked, when he had gone into his smoking-room 
with his usual bundle of papers. “ It is very 
cruel of you, Mrs. Oke. You ought to have 
more consideration for people who believe in 
such things, although you may not be able to 
put yourself in their frame of mind.” 

0 Who tells you that I don't believe in such 
things , as you call them ? ” she answered abruptly. 

11 Come,” she said, after a minute, 11 I want to 
show you why I believe in Christopher Lovelock. 
Come with me into the yellow room,” 


144 


HA UNTINGS. 


IV. 


What Mrs. Oke showed me in the yellow room 
was a large bundle of papers, some printed and 
some manuscript, but all of them brown with age, 
which she took out of an old Italian ebony inlaid 
cabinet. It took her some time to get them, as a 
complicated arrangement of double locks and false 
drawers had to be put in play ; and while she was 
doing so, I looked round the room, in which I had 
been only three or four times before. It was 
certainly the most beautiful room in this beautiful 
house, and, as it seemed to me now, the most 
strange. It was long and low, with something 
that made you think of the cabin of a ship, with 
a great mullioned window that let in, as it were, 
a perspective of the brownish green park- land, 
dotted with oaks, and sloping upwards to the 
distant line of bluish firs against the horizon. 
The walls were hung with flowered damask, whose 
yellow, faded to brown, united with the reddish 
colour of the carved wainscoting and the carved 
oaken beams. For the rest, it reminded me more 
of an Italian room than an English one. The 
furniture was Tuscan of the early seventeenth 
century, inlaid and carved ; there were a couple 
of faded allegorical pictures, by some Bolognese 
master, on the walls ; and in a corner, among a 
stack of dwarf orange-trees, a little Italian harp- 


OKE OF OKEHURST. 


i45 


sichord of exquisite curve and slenderness, with 
flowers and landscapes painted upon its cover. In 
a recess was a shelf of old books, mainly English 
and Italian poets of the Elizabethan time ; and 
close by it, placed upon a carved wedding-chest, 
a large and beautiful melon-shaped lute. The 
panes of the mullioned window were open, and 
yet the air seemed heavy, with an indescribable 
heady perfume, not that of any growing flower, 
but like that of old stuff that should have lain for 
years among spices. 

“ It is a beautiful room ! ” I exclaimed. “ I 
should awfully like to paint you in it ; ” but I had 
scarcely spoken the words when I felt I had done 
wrong. This woman's husband could not bear 
the room, and it seemed to me vaguely as if he 
were right in detesting it. 

Mrs. Oke took no notice of my exclamation, but 
beckoned me to the table where she was standing 
sorting the papers. 

“ Look ! ” she said, 11 these are all poems by 
Christopher Lovelock ; ” and touching the yellow 
papers with delicate and reverent fingers, she 
commenced reading some of them out loud in a 
slow, half-audible voice. They were songs in the 
style of those of Herrick, Waller, and Drayton, 
complaining for the most part of the cruelty of a 
lady called Dryope, in whose name was evidently 
concealed a reference to that of the mistress of 
Okehurst. The songs were graceful, and not with- 

it 


146 


HA UN TINGS. 


out a certain faded passion : but I was thinking 
not of them, but of the woman who was reading 
them to me. 

Mrs. Oke was standing with the brownish 
yellow wall as a background to her white brocade 
dress, which, in its stiff seventeenth-century make, 
seemed but to bring out more clearly the slight- 
ness, the exquisite suppleness, of her tall figure. 
She held the papers in one hand, and leaned the 
other, as if for support, on the inlaid cabinet by 
her side. Her voice, which was delicate, shadowy, 
like her person, had a curious throbbing cadence, 
as if she were reading the words of a melody, and 
restraining herself with difficulty from singing it ; 
and as she read, her long slender throat throbbed 
slightly, and a faint redness came into her thin 
face. She evidently knew the verses by heart, 
and her eyes were mostly fixed with that distant 
smile in them, with which harmonised a constant 
tremulous little smile in her lips. 

“ That is how I would wish to paint her !” 1 ex- 
claimed within myself ; and scarcely noticed, what 
struck me on thinking over the scene, that this 
strange being read these verses as one might fancy a 
woman would read love-verses addressed to herself. 

“ Those are all written for Alice Oke — Alice 
the daughter of Virgil Pomfret,” she said slowly, 
folding up the papers. “ I found them at the 
bottom of this cabinet. Can you doubt of the 
reality of Christopher Lovelock now ? ” 


OKE OF OKEHURST. i 47 

The question was an illogical one, for to doubt 
of the existence of Christopher Lovelock was one 
thing, and to doubt of the mode of his death was 
another ; but somehow I did feel convinced. 

“ Look ! ” she said, when she had replaced the 
poems, “ I will show you something else.” Among 
the flowers that stood on the upper storey of her 
writing-table— for I found that Mrs. Oke had a 
writing-table in the yellow room — stood, as on 
an altar, a small black carved frame, with a silk 
curtain drawn over it : the sort of thing behind 
which you would have expected to find a head of 
Christ or of the Virgin Mary. She drew the 
curtain and displayed a large - sized miniature, 
representing a young man, with auburn curls and 
a peaked auburn beard, dressed in black, but 
with lace about his neck, and large pear-shaped 
pearls in his ears : a wistful, melancholy face. 
Mrs. Oke took the miniature religiously off its 
stand, and showed me, written in faded characters 
upon the back, the name “ Christopher Lovelock,” 
and the date 1626. 

“ I found this in the secret drawer of that 
cabinet, together with the heap of poems,” she 
said, taking the miniature out of my hand. 

I was silent for a minute. 

“ Does — does Mr. Oke know that you have got 
it here ? ” I asked ; and then wondered what in 
the world had impelled me to put such a question. 

Mrs. Oke smiled that smile of contemptuous 


148 


HA UNTINGS. 


indifference. “ I have never hidden it from any 
one. If my husband disliked my having it, he 
might have taken it away, I suppose. It belongs 
to him, since it was found in his house.” 

I did not answer, but walked mechanically 
towards the door. There was something heady 
and oppressive in this beautiful room ; some- 
thing, I thought, almost repulsive in this exquisite 
woman. She seemed to me, suddenly, perverse 
and dangerous. 

I scarcely know why, but I neglected Mrs. 
Oke that afternoon. I went to Mr. Oke's study, 
and sat opposite to him smoking while he was 
engrossed in his accounts, his reports, and elec- 
tioneering papers. On the table, above the heap 
of paper-bound volumes and pigeon-holed docu- 
ments, was, as sole ornament of his den, a little 
photograph of his wife, done some years before. 
I don’t know why, but as I sat and watched him, 
with his florid, honest, manly beauty, working 
away conscientiously, with that little perplexed 
frown of his, I felt intensely sorry for this man. 

But this feeling did not last. There was no 
help for it : Oke was not as interesting as Mrs. 
Oke ; and it required too great an effort to pump 
up sympathy for this normal, excellent, exem- 
plary young squire, in the presence of so wonder- 
ful a creature as his wife. So I let myself go 
to the habit of allowing Mrs. Oke daily to talk 
over her strange craze, or rather of drawing her 


OKE OF OKEHURST. 


M9 

out about it. I confess that I derived a morbid 
and exquisite pleasure in doing so : it was so 
characteristic in her, so appropriate to the house ! 
It completed her personality so perfectly, and 
made it so much easier to conceive a way of 
painting her. I made up my mind little by 

little, while working at William Oke’s portrait 
(he proved a less easy subject than I had antici- 
pated, and, despite his conscientious efforts, was 
a nervous, uncomfortable sitter, silent and brood- 
ing) — I made up my mind that I would paint 

Mrs. Oke standing by the cabinet in the yellow 
room, in the white Vandyck dress copied from 
the portrait of her ancestress. Mr. Oke might 
resent it, Mrs. Oke even might resent it ; they 
might refuse to take the picture, to pay for 
it, to allow me to exhibit ; they might force 
me to run my umbrella through the picture. 
No matter. That picture should be painted, if 
merely for the sake of having painted it ; for 
I felt it was the only thing I could do, and 

that it would be far away my best work. I 

told neither of my resolution, but prepared sketch 
after sketch of Mrs. Oke, while continuing to 
paint her husband. 

Mrs. Oke was a silent person, more silent even 
than her husband, for she did not feel bound, as 
he did, to attempt to entertain a guest or to show 
any interest in him. She seemed to spend her 
life — a curious, inactive, half-invalidish life, broken 


HA UNTINGS. 


* 5 ° 

by sudden fits of childish cheerfulness — in an 
eternal day-dream, strolling about the house and 
grounds, arranging the quantities of flowers that 
always filled all the rooms, beginning to read and 
then throwing aside novels and books of poetry, of 
which she always had a large number ; and, I be- 
lieve, lying for hours, doing nothing, on a couch 
in that yellow drawing-room, which, with her sole 
exception, no member of the Oke family had ever 
been known to stay in alone. Little by little I 
began to suspect and to verify another eccentricity 
of this eccentric being, and to understand why there 
were stringent orders never to disturb her in that 
yellow room. 

It had been a habit at Okehurst, as at one or 
two other English manor-houses, to keep a certain 
amount of the clothes of each generation, more 
particularly wedding-dresses. A certain carved 
oaken press, of which Mr. Oke once displayed the 
contents to me, was a perfect museum of costumes, 
male and female, from the early years of the 
seventeenth to the end of the eighteenth century 
— a thing to take away the breath of a bric-a-brac 
collector, an antiquary, or a genre painter. Mr. 
Oke was none of these, and therefore took but 
little interest in the collection, save in so far as it 
interested his family feeling. Still he seemed well 
acquainted with the contents of that press. 

He was turning over the clothes for my benefit, 
when suddenly I noticed that he frowned. I 


OKE OF OKEHURST. 


* 5 * 

know not what impelled me to say, “ By the way, 
have you any dresses of that Mrs. Oke whom your 
wife resembles so much ? Have you got that par- 
ticular white dress she was painted in, perhaps ? ’’ 

Oke of Okehurst flushed very red. 

“ We have it," he answered hesitatingly, “ but 
— it isn’t here at present — I can’t find it. I sup- 
pose,’’ he blurted out with an effort, “that Alice 
has got it. Mrs. Oke sometimes has the fancy of 
having some of these old things down. I suppose 
she takes ideas from them." 

A sudden light dawned in my mind. The 
white dress in which I had seen Mrs. Oke in the 
yellow room, the day that she showed me Love- 
lock’s verses, was not, as I had thought, a modern 
copy ; it was the original dress of Alice Oke, the 
daughter of Virgil Pomfret — the dress in which, 
perhaps, Christopher Lovelock had seen her in 
that very room. 

The idea gave me a delightful picturesque 
shudder. I said nothing. But I pictured to my- 
self Mrs. Oke sitting in that yellow room — that 
room which no Oke of Okehurst save herself 
ventured to remain in alone, in the dress of her 
ancestress, confronting, as it were, that vague, 
haunting something that seemed to fill the place 
— that vague presence, it seemed to me, of the 
murdered cavalier poet. 

Mrs. Oke, as I have said, was extremely silent, 
as a result of being extremely indifferent. She 


152 


HA UNTINGS. 


really did not care in the least about anything 
except her own ideas and day-dreams, except when, 
every now and then, she was seized with a sudden 
desire to shock the prejudices or superstitions of 
her husband. Very soon she got into the way of 
never talking to me at all, save about Alice and 
Nicholas Oke and Christopher Lovelock ; and 
then, when the fit seized her, she would go on by 
the hour, never asking herself whether I was or 
was not equally interested in the strange craze 
that fascinated her. It so happened that I was. I 
loved to listen to her, going on discussing by the 
hour the merits of Lovelock's poems, and analysing 
her feelings and those of her two ancestors. It 
was quite wonderful to watch the exquisite, exotic 
creature in one of these moods, with the distant 
look in her grey eyes and the absent-looking smile 
in her thin cheeks, talking as if she had intimately 
known these people of the seventeenth century, 
discussing every minute mood of theirs, detailing 
every scene between them and their victim, talk- 
ing of Alice, and Nicholas, and Lovelock as she 
might of her most intimate friends. Of Alice 
particularly, and of Lovelock. She seemed to 
know every word that Alice had spoken, every 
idea that had crossed her mind. It sometimes 
struck me as if she were telling me, speaking of 
herself in the third person, of her own feelings — 
as if I were listening to a woman's confidences, 
the recital of her doubts, scruples, and agonies 


OKE OF OKEHURST. 


i53 


about a living lover. For Mrs. Oke, who seemed 
the most self-absorbed of creatures in all other 
matters, and utterly incapable* of understanding 
or sympathising with the feelings of other persons, 
entered completely and passionately into the feel- 
ing? of this woman, this Alice, who, at some 
moments, seemed to be not another woman, but 
herself. 

“ But how could she do it — how could she kill 
the man she cared for ? ” I* once asked her. 

“ Because she loved him more than the whole 
world ! ” she exclaimed, and rising suddenly from 
her chair, walked towards the window, covering 
her face with her hands. 

I could see, from the movement of her neck, 
that she was sobbing. She did not turn round, 
but motioned me to go away. 

“ Don’t let us talk any more about it,” she said. 
“ I am ill to-day, and silly.” 

I closed the door gently behind me. What 
mystery was there in this woman’s life ? This list- 
lessness, this strange self-engrossment and stranger 
mania about people long dead, this indifference 
and desire to annoy towards her husband — did it 
all mean that Alice Oke had loved or still loved 
some one who was not the master of Okehurst ? 
And his melancholy, his preoccupation, the some- 
thing about him that told of a broken youth — did 
it mean that he knew it ? 


154 


HA UN TINGS. 


V. 

The following days Mrs. Oke was in a condition of 
quite unusual good spirits. . Some visitors — distant 
relatives — were expected, and although she had 
expressed the utmost annoyance at the idea of 
their coming, she was now seized with a fit of 
housekeeping activity, and was perpetually about 
arranging things and giving orders, although all 
arrangements, as usual, had been made, and all 
orders given, by her husband. 

William Oke was quite radiant. 

11 If only Alice were always well like this ! " he 
exclaimed ; “ if only she would take, or could take, 
an interest in life, how different things would be ! 
But," he added, as if fearful lest he should be 
supposed to accuse her in any way, “how can she, 
usually, with her wretched health ? Still, it does 
make me awfully happy to see her like this." 

I nodded. But I cannot say that I really ac- 
quiesced in his views. It seemed to me, parti- 
cularly with the recollection of yesterday’s extra- 
ordinary scene, that Mrs. Oke’s high spirits were 
anything but normal. There was something in 
her unusual activity and still more unusual cheer- 
fulness that was merely nervous and feverish ; and 
I had, the whole day, the impression of dealing 
with a woman who was ill and who would very 
speedily collapse. 


OKE OF OKEHURST. 


*55 


Mrs. Oke spent her day wandering from one 
room to another, and from the garden to the green- 
house, seeing whether all was in order, when, as 
a matter of fact, all was always in order at Oke- 
hurst. She did not give me any sitting, and not 
a word was spoken about Alice Oke or Christopher 
Lovelock. Indeed, to a casual observer, it might 
have seemed as if all that craze about Lovelock 
had completely departed, or never existed. About 
five o’clock, as I was strolling among the red-brick 
round-gabled outhouses — each with its armorial 
oak — and the old-fashioned spalliered kitchen and 
fruit garden, I saw Mrs. Oke standing, her hands 
full of York ancl Lancaster roses, upon the steps 
facing the stables. A groom was currycombing a 
horse, and outside the coach-house was Mr. Oke’s 
little high-wheeled cart. 

“ Let us have a drive ! ” suddenly exclaimed 
Mrs. Oke, on seeing me. il Look what a beautiful 
evening — and look at that dear little cart ! It is 
so long since I have driven, and I feel as if I must 
drive again. Come with me. And you, harness 
Jim at once and come round to the door.” 

I was quite amazed ; and still more so when 
the cart drove up before the door, and Mrs. Oke 
called to me to accompany her. She sent away 
the groom, and in a minute we were rolling along, 
at a tremendous pace, along the yellow-sand road, 
with the sere pasture-lands, the big oaks, on either 
side. 


! 5 6 


HA UN TINGS. 


I could scarcely believe my senses. This woman, 
in her mannish little coat and hat, driving a power- 
ful young horse with the utmost skill, and chatter- 
ing like a school-girl of sixteen, could not be the 
delicate, morbid, exotic, hot-house creature, unable 
to walk or to do anything, who spent her days • 
lying about on couches in the heavy atmosphere, 
redolent with strange scents and associations, of 
the yellow drawing-room. The movement of the 
light carriage, the cool draught, the very grind of 
the wheels upon the gravel, seemed to go to her 
head like wine. 

“ It is so long since I have done this sort of 
thing," she kept repeating ; “ so long, so long. 
Oh, don’t you think it delightful, going at this 
pace, with the idea that any moment the horse 
may come down and we two be killed ? ” and she 
laughed her childish laugh, and turned her face, no 
longer pale, but flushed with the movement and 
the excitement, towards me. 

The cart rolled on quicker and quicker, one 
gate after another swinging to behind us, as we 
flew up and down the little hills, across the pas- 
ture lands, through the little red-brick gabled 
villages, where the people came out to see us pass, 
past the rows of willows along the streams, and 
the dark-green compact hop-fields, with the blue 
and hazy tree-tops of the horizon getting bluer 
and more hazy as the yellow light began to graze 
the ground. At last we got to an open space, a 


OKE OF 'OKEHURST. 


*57 


high-lying piece of common-land, such as is rare 
in that ruthlessly utilised country of grazing-grounds 
and hop-gardens. Among the low hills of the 
Weald, it seemed quite preternaturally high up, 
giving a sense that its extent of flat heather and 
gorse, bound by distant firs, was really on the top 
of the world. The sun was setting just opposite, 
and its lights lay flat on the ground, staining it 
with the red and black of the heather, or rather 
turning it into the surface of a purple sea, canopied 
over by a bank of dark-purple clouds — the jet-like 
sparkle of the dry ling and gorse tipping the purple 
like sunlit wavelets. A cold wind swept in our 
faces. 

“ What is the name of this place ? ” I asked. 
It was the only bit of impressive scenery that I 
had met in the neighbourhood of Okehurst. 

" It is called Cotes Common,” answered Mrs. 
Oke, who had slackened the pace of the horse, 
and let the reins hang loose about his neck. 
il It was here that Christopher Lovelock was 
killed.” 

There was a moment’s pause ; and then she 
proceeded, tickling the flies from the horse’s ears 
with the end of her whip, and looking straight into 
the sunset, which now rolled, a deep purple stream, 
across the heath to our feet — * 

“ Lovelock was riding home one summer even- 
ing from Appledore, when, as he had got half-way 
across Cotes Common, somewhere about here — for 


HA UN TINGS. 


158 

I have always heard them mention the pond in 
the old gravel-pits as about the place— he saw 
two men riding towards him, in whom he presently 
recognised Nicholas Oke of Okehurst accompanied 
by a groom. Oke of Okehurst hailed him ; and 
Lovelock rode up to meet him. ‘ I am glad to 
have met you, Mr. Lovelock,’ said Nicholas, ‘ be- 
cause I have some important news for you ; ’ and 
so saying, he brought his horse close to the one that 
Lovelock was riding, and suddenly turning round, 
fired off a pistol at his head. Lovelock had time 
to move, and the bullet, instead of striking him, 
went straight into the head of his horse, which 
fell beneath him. Lovelock, however, had fallen 
in such a way as to be able to extricate himself 
easily from his horse ; and drawing his sword? he 
rushed upon Oke, and seized his horse by the 
bridle. Oke quickly jumped off and drew his 
sword ; and in a minute, Lovelock, who was much 
the better swordsman of the two, was having 
the better of him. Lovelock had completely dis- 
armed him, and got his sword at Oke’s throat, 
crying out to him that if he would ask forgiveness 
he should be spared for the sake of their old friend- 
ship, when the groom suddenly rode up from be- 
hind and shot Lovelock through the back. Lovelock 
fell, and Oke immediately tried to finish him 
with his sword, while the groom drew up and 
held the bridle of Oke’s horse. At that moment 
the sunlight fell upon the groom’s face, and Love- 


OKE OF OKEHURST . 


*59 


lock recognised Mrs. Oke. He cried out, ‘ Alice, 
Alice ! it is you who have murdered me ! ’ and 
died. Then Nicholas Oke sprang into his saddle 
and rode off with his wife, leaving Lovelock dead 
by the side of his fallen horse. Nicholas Oke had 
taken the precaution of removing Lovelock’s purse 
and throwing it into the pond, so the murder was 
put down to certain highwaymen who were about 
in that part of the country. Alice Oke died many 
years afterwards, quite an old woman, in the 
reign of Charles II. ; but Nicholas did not live 
very long, and shortly before his death got into 
a very strange condition, always brooding, and 
sometimes threatening to kill his wife. They say 
that in one of these fits, just shortly before his 
death, he told the whole story of the murder, and 
made a prophecy that when the head of his house 
and master of Okehurst should marry another 
Alice Oke, descended from himself and his wife, 
there should be an end of the Okes of Okehurst. 
You see, it seems to be coming true. We have 
no children, and I don’t suppose we shall ever 
have any. I, at least, have never wished for 
them.” 

Mrs. Oke paused, and turned her face towards 
me with the absent smile in her thin cheeks : her 
eyes no longer had that distant look ; they were 
strangely eager and fixed. I did not know what 
to answer; this woman positively frightened me. 
We remained for a moment in that same place, 


i6o 


HA UN TINGS. 


with the sunlight dying away in crimson ripples 
on the heather, gilding the yellow banks, the black 
waters of the pond, surrounded by thin rushes, 
and the yellow gravel-pits ; while the wind blew 
in our faces and bent the ragged warped bluish 
tops of the firs. Then Mrs. Oke touched the horse, 
and off we went at a furious pace. We did not 
exchange a single word, I think, on the way home. 
Mrs. Oke sat with her eyes fixed on the reins, 
breaking the silence now and then only by a word 
to the horse, urging him to an even more furious 
pace. The people we met along the roads must 
have thought that the horse was running away, 
unless they noticed Mrs. Oke’s calm manner and 
the look of excited enjoyment in her face. To 
me it seemed that I was in the hands of a mad- 
woman, and I quietly prepared myself for being 
upset or dashed against a cart. It had turned 
cold, and the draught was icy in our faces when 
we got within sight of the red gables and high 
chimney-stacks of Okehurst. Mr. Oke was stand- 
ing before the door. On our approach I saw a 
look of relieved suspense, of keen pleasure come 
into his face. 

He lifted his wife out of the cart in his strong 
arms with a kind of chivalrous tenderness. 

u I am so glad to have you back, darling," he 
exclaimed — “ so glad ! I was delighted to hear 
you had gone out with the cart, but as you have 
not driven for so long, I was beginning to be 


OKE OF OKEHURST. 


161 


frightfully anxious, dearest. Where have you been 
all this time ? ” 

Mrs. Oke had quickly extricated herself from 
her husband, who had remained holding her, as 
one might hold a delicate child who has been 
causing anxiety. The gentleness and affection of 
the poor fellow had evidently not touched her — 
she seemed almost to recoil from it. 

“ I have taken him to Cotes Common,” she 
said, with that perverse look which I had noticed 
before, as she pulled off her driving-gloves. “It 
is such a splendid old place.” 

Mr. Oke flushed as if he had bitten upon a sore 
tooth, and the double gash painted itself scarlet 
between his eyebrows. 

Outside, the mists were beginning to rise, veil- 
ing the park-land dotted with big black oaks, and 
from which, in the watery moonlight, rose on all 
sides the eerie little cry of the lambs separated 
from their mothers. It was damp and cold, and I 
shivered. 


VI. 

The next day Okehurst was full of people, and 
Mrs. Oke, to my amazement, was doing the hon- 
ours of it as if a house full of commonplace, noisy 
young creatures, bent upon flirting and tennis, were 
her usual idea of felicity. 

The afternoon of the third day — they had come 

L 


162 


HA UN TINGS. 


for an electioneering ball, and stayed three nights 
— the weather changed ; it turned suddenly very 
cold and began to pour. Every one was sent in- 
doors, and there was a general gloom suddenly 
over the company. Mrs. Oke seemed to have got 
sick of her guests, and was listlessly lying back on 
a couch, paying not the slightest attention to the 
chattering and piano-strumming in the room, when 
one of the guests suddenly proposed that they 
should play charades. He was a distant cousin of 
the Okes, a sort of fashionable artistic Bohemian, 
swelled out to intolerable conceit by the amateur- 
actor vogue of a season. 

“ It would be lovely in this marvellous old place,” 
he cried, “just to dress up, and parade about, and 
feel as if we belonged to the past. I have heard 
you have a marvellous collection of old costumes, 
more or less ever since the days of Noah, some- 
where, Cousin Bill.” 

The whole party exclaimed in joy at this pro- 
posal. William Oke looked puzzled for a moment, 
and glanced at his wife, who continued to lie list- 
less on her sofa. 

“There is a press full of clothes belonging to 
the family,” he answered dubiously, apparently 
overwhelmed by the desire to please his guests; 
“ but — but — I don't know whether it’s quite re- 
spectful to dress up in the clothes of dead people.” 

“ Oh, fiddlestick ! ” cried the cousin. “ What 
do the dead people know about it ? Besides,” he 


OKE OF OKEHURST. 


163 


added, with mock seriousness, “ I assure you we 
shall behave in the most reverent way and feel 
quite solemn about it all, if only you will give us 
the key, old man.” 

Again Mr. Oke looked towards his wife, and 
again met only her vague, absent glance. 

“Very well/’ he said, and led his guests up- 
stairs. 

An hour later the house was filled with the 
strangest crew and the strangest noises. I had 
entered, to a certain extent, into William Oke's 
feeling of unwillingness to let his ancestors' clothes 
and personality be taken in vain ; but when the 
masquerade was complete, I must say that the effect 
was quite magnificent. A dozen youngish men 
and women — those v/ho were staying in the house 
and some neighbours who had come for lawn- 
tennjs and dinner — were rigged out, under the 
direction of the theatrical cousin, in the contents 
of that oaken press : and I have never seen a more 
beautiful sight than the panelled corridors, the 
carved and escutcheoned staircase, the dim draw- 
ing-rooms with their faded tapestries, the great 
hall with its vaulted and ribbed ceiling, dotted about 
with groups or single figures that seemed to have 
come straight from the past. Even William Oke, 
who, besides myself and a few elderly people, was 
the only man not masqueraded, seemed delighted 
and fired by the sight. A certain schoolboy char- 
acter suddenly came out in him ; and finding that 


164 


HA UN TINGS. 


there was no costume left for him, he rushed up- 
stairs and presently returned in the uniform he had 
worn before his marriage. I thought I had really 
never seen so magnificent a specimen of the hand- 
some Englishman; he looked, despite all the modern 
associations of his costume, more genuinely old- 
world than all the rest, a knight for the Black 
Prince or Sidney, with his admirably regular 
features and beautiful fair hair and complexion. 
After a minute, even the elderly people had got 
costumes of some sort — dominoes arranged at the 
moment, and hoods and all manner of disguises 
made out of pieces of old embroidery and Oriental 
stuffs and furs ; and very soon this rabble of 
masquers had become, so to speak, completely 
drunk with its own amusement — with the childish- 
ness, and, if I may say so, the barbarism, the 
vulgarity underlying the majority even of well-bred 
English men and women — Mr. Oke himself doing 
the mountebank like a schoolboy at Christmas. 

“ Where is Mrs. Oke ? Where is Alice ? ” some 
one suddenly asked. 

Mrs. Oke had vanished. I could fully under- 
stand that to this eccentric being, with her fan- 
tastic, imaginative, morbid passion for the past, 
such a carnival as this must be positively revolt- 
ing ; and, absolutely indifferent as she was to 
giving offence, I could imagine how she would 
have retired, disgusted and outraged, to dream her 
strange day-dreams in the yellow room. 


OKE OF OKEHURST . 165 

But a moment later, as we were all noisily pre- 
paring to go in to dinner, the door opened and a 
strange figure entered, stranger than any of these 
others who were profaning the clothes of the dead : 
a boy,' slight and tall, in a brown riding-coat, 
leathern belt, and big buff boots, a little grey cloak 
over one shoulder, a large grey hat slouched over 
the eyes, a dagger and pistol at the waist. It 
was Mrs. Oke, her eyes preternaturally bright, and 
her whole face lit up with a bold, perverse smile. 

Every one exclaimed, and stood aside. Then 
there was a moment's silence, broken by faint 
applause. Even to a crew of noisy boys and girls 
playing the fool in the garments of men and women 
long dead and buried, there is something question- 
able in the sudden appearance of a young married 
woman, the mistress of the house, in a riding-coat 
and jack-boots ; and Mrs. Oke's expression did not 
make the jest seem any the less questionable. 

“What is that costume?" asked the 4 heatrical 
cousin, who, after a second, had come to the con- 
clusion that Mrs. Oke was merely a woman of 
marvellous talent whom he must try and secure 
for his amateur troop next season. 

“ It is the dress in which an ancestress of ours, 
my namesake Alice Oke, used to go out riding 
with her husband in the days of Charles I.,” she 
answered, and took her seat at the head of the 
table. Involuntarily my eyes sought those of Oke 
of Okehurst. He, who blushed as easily as a girl 


1 66 


HA UNTINGS. 


of sixteen, was now as white as ashes, and I 
noticed that he pressed his hand almost convul- 
sively to his mouth. 

“ Don't you recognise my dress, William?” 
asked Mrs. Oke, fixing her eyes upon him with a 
cruel smile. 

He did not answer, and there was a moment’s 
silence, which the theatrical cousin had the happy 
thought of breaking by jumping upon his seat and 
emptying off his glass with the exclamation — 

“ To the health of the two Alice Okes, of the 
past and the present ! ” 

Mrs. Oke nodded, and with an expression I had 
never seen in her face before, answered in a loud 
and aggressive tone — 

“To the health of the poet, Mr. Christopher 
Lovelock, if his ghost be honouring this house 
with its presence ! ” 

I felt suddenly as if I were in a madhouse. 
Across the table, in the midst of this room full of 
noisy wretches, tricked out red, blue, purple, and 
parti-coloured, as men and women of the sixteenth, 
seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, as impro- 
vised Turks and Eskimos, and dominoes, and 
clowns, with faces painted and corked and floured 
over, I seemed to see that sanguine sunset, wash- 
ing like a sea of blood over the heather, to where, 
by the black pond and the wind-warped firs, there 
lay the body of Christopher Lovelock, with his 
dead horse near him, the yellow gravel and 


OKE OF OKEHURST. 


167 


lilac ling soaked crimson all around ; and above 
emerged, as out of the redness, the pale blond 
head covered with the grey hat, the absent eyes, 
and strange smile of Mrs. Oke. It seemed to me 
horrible, vulgar, abominable, as if I had got inside 
a madhouse. 


VII. 

From that moment I noticed a change in William 
Oke ; or rather, a change that had probably been 
coming on for some time got to the stage of being 
noticeable. 

I don’t know whether he had any words with 
his wife about her masquerade of that unlucky 
evening. On the whole I decidedly think not. 
Oke was with every one a diffident and reserved 
man, and most of all so with his wife ; besides, I 
can fancy that he would experience a positive im- 
possibility of putting into words any strong feeling 
of disapprobation towards her, that his disgust 
would necessarily be silent. But be this as it may, 
I perceived very soon that the relations between 
my host and hostess had become exceedingly 
strained. Mrs. Oke, indeed, had never paid much 
attention to her husband, and seemed merely a 
trifle more indifferent to his presence than she had 
been before. But Oke himself, although he affected 
to address her at meals from a desire to conceal 
his feeling, and a fear of making the position dis- 


i68 


HA UN TINGS. 


agreeable to me, very clearly could scarcely bear to 
speak to or even see his wife. The poor fellow’s 
honest soul was quite brimful of pain, which he 
was determined not to allow to overflow, and 
which seemed to filter into his whole nature and 
poison it. . This woman had shocked and pained 
him more than was possible to say, and yet it was 
evident that he could neither cease loving her nor 
commence comprehending her real nature. I some- 
times felt, as we took our long walks through the 
monotonous country, across the oak-dotted grazing- 
grounds, and by the brink of the dull-green, serried 
hop-rows, talking at rare intervals about the value 
of the crops, the drainage of the estate, the village 
schools, the Primrose League, and the iniquities of 
Mr. Gladstone, while Oke of Okehurst carefully 
cut down every tall thistle that caught his eye — 
I sometimes felt, I say, an intense and impotent 
desire to enlighten this man about his wife’s char- 
acter. I seemed to understand it so well, and to 
understand it well seemed to imply such a com- 
fortable acquiescence ; and it seemed so unfair that 
just he should be condemned to puzzle for ever 
over this enigma, and wear out his soul trying to 
comprehend what now seemed so plain to me. But 
how would it ever be possible to get this serious, 
conscientious, slow-brained representative of English 
simplicity and honesty and thoroughness to under- 
stand the mixture of self-engrossed vanity, of 
shallowness, of poetic vision, of love of morbid 


OKE OF OKEHURST. 169 

excitement, that walked this earth under the name 
of Alice Oke ? 

So Oke of Okehurst was condemned never to 
understand ; but he was condemned also to suffer 
from his inability to do so. The poor fellow was 
constantly straining after an explanation of his 
wife’s peculiarities ; and although the effort was 
probably unconscious, it caused him a great deal of 
pain. The gash — the maniac-frown, as my friend 
calls it — between his eyebrows, seemed to have 
grown a permanent feature of his face. 

Mrs. Oke, on her side, was making the very 
worst of the situation. Perhaps she resented her 
husband’s tacit reproval of that masquerade night’s 
freak, and determined to make him swallow more 
of the same stuff, for she clearly thought that one 
of William’s peculiarities, and one for which she 
despised him, was that he could never be goaded 
into an outspoken expression of disapprobation ; 
that from her he would swallow any amount of 
bitterness without complaining. At any rate she 
now adopted a perfect policy of teasing and shock- 
ing her husband about the murder of Lovelock. 
She was perpetually alluding to it in her conversa- 
tion, discussing in his presence what had or had 
not been the feelings of the various actors in the 
tragedy of 1626, and insisting upon her resemblance 
and almost identity with the original Alice Oke. 
Something had suggested to her eccentric mind that 
it would be delightful to perform in the garden at 


HA UNTINGS. 


170 

Okehurst, under the huge ilexes and elms, a little 
masque which she had discovered among Chris- 
topher Lovelock’s works ; and she began to scour 
the country and enter into vast correspondence for 
the purpose of effectuating this scheme. Letters 
arrived every other day from the theatrical cousin, 
whose only objection was that Okehurst w.as too 
remote a locality for an entertainment in which he 
foresaw great glory to himself. And every now 
and then there would arrive some young gentleman 
or lady, whom Alice Oke had sent for to see 
whether they would do. 

I saw very plainly that the performance would 
never take place, and that Mrs. Oke herself had 
no intention that it ever should. She was one of 
those creatures to whom realisation of a project 
is nothing, and who enjoy plan-making almost the 
more for knowing that all will stop short at the 
plan. Meanwhile, this perpetual talk about the 
pastoral, about Lovelock, this continual attitudin- 
ising as the wife of Nicholas Oke, had the further 
attraction to Mrs. Oke of putting her husband into 
a condition of frightful though suppressed irrita- 
tion, which she enjoyed with the enjoyment of a 
perverse child. You must not think that I looked 
on indifferent, although I admit that this was a 
perfect treat to an amateur student of character 
like myself. I really did feel most sorry for poor 
Oke, and frequently quite indignant with his wife. 
I was several times on the point of begging her to 


OKE OF OKEHURST. 


171 

have more consideration for him, even of suggest- 
ing that this kind of behaviour, particularly before 
a comparative stranger like me, was very poor 
taste. But there was something elusive about 
Mrs. Oke, which made it next to impossible to 
speak seriously with her ; and besides, I was by 
no means sure that any interference on my part 
would not merely animate her perversity. 

One evening a curious incident took place. We 
had just sat down to dinner, the Okes, the theatrical 
cousin, who was down for a couple of days, and 
three or four neighbours. It was dusk, and the 
yellow light of the candles mingled charmingly 
with the greyness of the evening. Mrs. Oke was 
not well, and had been remarkably quiet all day, 
more diaphanous, strange, and far-away than ever ; 
and her husband seemed to have felt a sudden 
return of tenderness, almost of compassion, for this 
delicate, fragile creature. We had been talking 
of quite indifferent matters, when I saw Mr. Oke 
suddenly turn very white, and look fixedly for a 
moment at the window opposite t$ his seat. 

“ Who’s that fellow looking in at the window, 
and making signs to you, Alice ? Damn his im- 
pudence ! ” he cried, and jumping up, ran to the 
window, opened it, and passed out into the twi- 
light. We all looked at each other in surprise ; 
some of the party remarked upon the carelessness 
of servants in letting nasty- looking fellows hang 
about the kitchen, others told stories of tramps 


172 


HA UN TINGS. 


and burglars. Mrs. Oke did not speak ; but I 
noticed the curious, distant-looking smile in her 
thin cheeks. 

After a minute William Oke came in, his nap- 
kin in his hand. He shut the window behind him 
and silently resumed his place. 

“ Well, who was it ? " we all asked. 

u Nobody. I — I must have made a mistake/' 
he answered, and turned crimson, while he busily 
peeled a pear. 

“ It was probably Lovelock," remarked Mrs. Oke, 
just as she might have said, “ It was probably the 
gardener," but with that faint smile of pleasure 
still in her face. Except the theatrical cousin, who 
burst into a loud laugh, none of the company had 
ever heard Lovelock's name, and, doubtless imagin- 
ing him to be some natural appanage of the Oke 
family, groom or farmer, said nothing, so the 
subject dropped. 

From that evening onwards things began to 
assume a different aspect. That incident was the 
beginning of a perfect system — a system of what ? 
I scarcely know how to call it. A system of grim 
jokes on the part of Mrs. Oke, of superstitious 
fancies on the part of her husband — a system of 
mysterious persecutions on the part of some less 
earthly tenant of Okehurst. Well, yes, after all, 
why not ? We have all heard of ghosts, had 
uncles, cousins, grandmothers, nurses, who have 
seen them ; we are all a bit afraid of them at the 


OKE OF OKEHURST. 


i73 


bottom of our soul ; so why shouldn’t they be ? I 
am too sceptical to believe in the impossibility of 
anything, for my part ! Besides, when a man has 
lived throughout a summer in the same house 
with a woman like Mrs. Oke of Okehurst, he gets 
to believe in the possibility of a great many im- 
probable things, I assure you, as a mere result of 
believing in her. And when you come to think 
of it, why not ? That a weird creature, visibly 
not of this earth, a reincarnation of a woman who 
murdered her lover two centuries and a half ago, 
that such a creature should have the power of 
attracting about her ('being altogether superior to 
earthly lovers) the man who loved her in that 
previous existence, whose love for her was his 
death — what is there astonishing in that ? Mrs. 
Oke herself, I feel quite persuaded, believed or half 
believed it ; indeed she very seriously admitted the 
possibility thereof, one day that I made the sug- 
gestion half in jest. At all events, it rather pleased 
me to think so ; it fitted in so well with the 
woman’s whole personality ; it explained those 
hours and hours spent all alone in the yellow room, 
where the very air, with its scent of heady flowers 
and old perfumed stuffs, seemed redolent of ghosts. 
It explained that strange smile which was not for 
any of us, and yet was not merely for herself — 
that strange, far-off look in the wide pale eyes. I 
liked the idea, and I liked to tease, or rather to 
delight her with it. How should I know that 


HA UN TINGS. 


i74 

the wretched husband would take such matters 

seriously ? 

He became day by day more silent and per- 
plexed-looking ; and, as a result, worked harder, 
and probably with less effect, at his land-imp-rov- 
ing schemes and political canvassing. It seemed 
to me that he was perpetually listening, watching, 
waiting for something to happen : a word spoken 
suddenly, the sharp opening of a door, would make 
him start, turn crimson, and almost tremble ; the 
mention of Lovelock brought a helpless look, half 
a convulsion, like that of a man overcome by great 
heat, into his face. And his wife, so far from 
taking any interest in his altered looks, went on 
irritating him more and more. Every time that 
the poor fellow gave one of those starts of his, or 
turned crimson at the sudden sound of a footstep, 
Mrs. Oke would ask him, with her contemptuous 
indifference, whether he had seen Lovelock. I 
soon began to perceive that my host was getting 
perfectly ill. He would sit at meals never saying 
a word, with his eyes fixed scrutinisingly on his 
wife, as if vainly trying to solve some dreadful 
mystery ; while his wife, ethereal, exquisite, went 
on talking in her listless way about the masque, 
about Lovelock, always about Lovelock. During 
our walks and rides, which we continued pretty 
regularly, he would start whenever in the roads or 
lanes surrounding Okehurst, or in its grounds, we 
perceived a figure in the distance, I have seen 


OKE OF OKE HURST. 


i7S 


him tremble at what, on nearer approach, I could 
scarcely restrain my laughter on discovering to 
be some well-known farmer or neighbour or ser- 
vant. Once, as we were returning home at dusk, 
he suddenly caught my arm and pointed across 
the oak-dotted pastures in the direction of the 
garden, then started off almost at a run, with 
his dog behind him, as if in pursuit of some 
intruder. 

“ Who was it ? ” I asked. And Mr. Oke merely 
shook his head mournfully. Sometimes in the 
early autumn twilights, when the white mists rose 
from the park-land, and the rooks formed long 
black lines on the palings, I almost fancied I saw 
him start at the very trees and bushes, the out- 
lines of the distant oast-houses, with their conical 
roofs and projecting vanes, like gibing fingers in 
the half light. 

“Your husband is ill,” I once ventured to re- 
mark to Mrs. Oke, as she sat for the hundred-and- 
thirtieth of my preparatory sketches (I somehow 
Could never get beyond preparatory sketches with 
her). She raised her beautiful, wide, pale eyes, 
making as she did so that exquisite curve of 
shoulders and neck and delicate pale head tha-t I 
so vainly longed to reproduce. 

“ I don’t see it,” she answered quietly. 11 If he 
is, why doesn’t he go up to town and see the 
doctor? It’s merely one of his glum fits.” 

“You should not tease him about Lovelock,” I 


176 


HA UNTINGS. 


added, very seriously. “ He will get to believe 
in him.” 

“Why not? If he sees him, why he sees him. 
He would not be the only person that has done 
so ; ” and she smiled faintly and half perversely, 
as her eyes sought that usual distant indefinable 
something. 

But Oke got worse. He was growing perfectly 
unstrung, like a hysterical woman. One evening 
that we were sitting alone in the smoking-room, 
he began unexpectedly a rambling discourse about 
his wife ; how he had first known her when they 
were children, and they had gone to the same 
dancing-school near Portland Place ; how her 
mother, his aunt-in-law, had brought her for 
Christmas to Okehurst while he was on his holi- 
days; how finally, thirteen years ago, when he 
was twenty-three and she was eighteen, they had 
been married ; how terribly he had suffered when 
they had been disappointed of their baby, and she 
had nearly died of the illness. 

“ I did not mind about the child, you know,” he 
said in an excited voice ; “ although there will be 
an end of us now, and Okehurst will go to the 
Curtises. I minded only about Alice.” It was 
next to inconceivable that this poor excited creature, 
speaking almost with tears in his voice and in his 
eyes, was the quiet, well-got-up, irreproachable 
young ex-Guardsman who had walked into my 
studio a couple of months before. 


OKE OF OKE HURST. 


177 


Oke was silent for a moment, looking fixedly at 
the rug at his feet, when he suddenly burst out 
in a scarce audible voice — 

“ If you knew how I cared for Alice — how I 
still care for her. I could kiss the ground she 
walks upon. I would give anything — my life any 
day — if only she would look for two minutes as 
if she liked me a little — as if she didn’t utterly 
despise me ; ” and the poor fellow burst into a 
hysterical laugh, which was almost a sob. Then 
he suddenly began to laugh outright, exclaiming, 
with a sort of vulgarity of intonation which was 
extremely foreign to him — 

“ Damn it, old fellow, this is a queer world we 
live in ! ” and rang for more brandy and soda, which 
he was beginning, I noticed, to take pretty freely 
now, although he had been almost a blue-ribbon 
man — as much so as is possible for a hospitable 
country gentleman — when I first arrived. 


VIII. 

It became clear to me now that, incredible as it 
might seem, the thing that ailed William Oke was 
jealousy. He was simply madly in love with his 
wife, and madly jealous of her. Jealous — but of 
whom ? He himself would probably have been 
quite unable to say. In the first place — to clear 
off any possible suspicion — certainly not of me. 

M 


178 


HA UNTINGS, 


Besides the fact that Mrs. Oke took only just a 
very little more interest in me than in the butler or 
the upper- housemaid, I think that Oke himself was 
the sort of man whose imagination would recoil 
from realising any definite object of jealousy, even 
though jealousy might be killing him inch by inch. 
It remained a vague, permeating, continuous feel- 
ing — the feeling that he loved her, and she did 
not care a jackstraw about him, and that every 
thing with which she came into contact was re- 
ceiving some of that notice which was refused to 
him — every person, or thing, or tree, or stone : 
it was the recognition of that strange far-off look 
in Mrs. Oke’s eyes, of that strange absent smile 
on Mrs. Oke’s lips — eyes and lips that had no look 
and no smile for him. 

Gradually his nervousness, his watchfulness, 
suspiciousness, tendency to start, took a definite 
shape. Mr. Oke was for ever alluding to steps or 
voices he had heard, to figures he had seen sneak- 
ing round the house. The sudden bark of one of 
the dogs would make him jump up. He cleaned 
and loaded very carefully all the guns and revolvers 
in his study, and even some of the old 'fowling- 
pieces and holster-pistols in the hall. The servants 
and tenants thought that Oke of Okehurst had 
been seized with a terror of tramps and burglars. 
Mrs. Oke smiled contemptuously at all these 
doings. 

“My dear William/" she said one day, “the 


OKE OF OKEHURST. 


179 


persons who worry you have just as good a right 
to walk up and down the passages and staircase, 
and to hang about the house, as you or I. They 
were there, in all probability, long before either 
of us was born, and are greatly amused by your 
preposterous notions of privacy.” 

Mr. Oke laughed angrily. “ I suppose you will 
tell me it is Lovelock — your eternal Lovelock — 
whose steps I hear on the gravel every night. I 
suppose he has as good a right to be here as you 
or I.” And he strode out of the room. 

“ Lovelock — Lovelock ! Why will she always 
go on like that about Lovelock ? ” Mr. Oke asked 
me that evening, suddenly staring me in the face. 

I merely laughed. 

“ It's only because she has that play of his on 
the brain,” I answered ; “ and because she thinks 
you superstitious, and likes to tease you.” 

“ I don't understand,” sighed Oke. 

How could he ? And if I had tried to make 
him do so, he would merely have thought I was 
insulting his wife, and have perhaps kicked me 
out of the room. So I made no attempt to explain 
psychological problems to him, and he asked me 

no more questions until once But I must 

first mention a curious incident that happened. 

The incident was simply this. Returning one 
afternoon from our usual walk, Mr. Oke suddenly 
asked the servant whether any one had come. 
The answer was in the negative ; but Oke did not 


180 HAUNTINGS. 

seem satisfied. We had hardly sat down to 
dinner when he turned to his wife and asked, in 
a strange voice which I scarcely recognised as his 
own, who had called that afternoon. 

“ No one,” answered Mrs. Oke ; “ at least to the 
best of my knowledge.” 

William Oke looked at her fixedly. 

“ No one ? ” he repeated, in a scrutinising tone ; 
u no one, Alice ? ” 

Mrs. Oke shook her head. “ No one/’ she 
replied. 

There was a pause. 

“ Who was it, then, that was walking with you near 
the pond, about five o’clock ? ” asked Oke slowly. 

His wife lifted her eyes straight to his and 
answered contemptuously — 

“ No one was walking with me near the pond, 
at five o’clock or any other hour.” 

Mr. Oke turned purple, and made a curious 
hoarse noise like a man choking. 

° I — I thought I saw you walking with a man 
this afternoon, Alice,” he brought out with an 
effort ; adding, for the sake of appearances before 
me, “ I thought it might have been the curate come 
with that report for me.” 

Mrs. Oke smiled. 

" I can only repeat that no living creature has 
been near me this afternoon,” she said slowly. 
" If you saw any one with me, it must have been 
Lovelock, for there certainly was no one else.” 


OKE OF OKEHURST. 


181 


And she gave a little sigh, like a person trying 
to reproduce in her mind some delightful but too 
evanescent impression. 

I looked at my host ; from crimson his face had 
turned perfectly livid, and he breathed as if some 
one were squeezing his windpipe. 

No more was said about the matter. I vaguely 
felt that a great danger was threatening. To Oke 
or to Mrs. Oke ? I could not tell which ; but I 
was aware of an imperious inner call to avert some 
dreadful evil, to exert myself, to explain, to inter- 
pose. I determined to speak to Oke the following 
day, for I trusted him to give me a quiet hearing, 
and 1 did not trust Mrs. Oke. That woman would 
slip through my fingers like a snake if I attempted 
to grasp her elusive character. 

I asked Oke whether he would take a walk with 
me the next afternoon, and he accepted to do so 
with a curious eagerness. We started about three 
o'clock. It was a stormy, chilly afternoon, with 
great balls of white clouds rolling rapidly in the 
cold blue sky, and occasional lurid gleams of sun- 
light, broad and yellow, which made the black ridge 
of the storm, gathered on the horizon, look blue- 
black like ink. 

We walked quickly across the sere and sodden 
grass of the park, and on to the highroad that led 
over the low hills, I don't know why, in the direc- 
tion of Cotes Common. Both of us were silent, 
for both of us had something to say, and did not 


182 


HA UN TINGS. 


know how to begin. For my part, I recognised the 
impossibility of starting the subject : an uncalled- 
for interference from me would merely indispose 
Mr. Oke, and make him doubly dense of compre- 
hensioh. So, if Oke had something to say, which 
he evidently had, it was better to wait for. him. 

Oke, however, broke the silence only by point- 
ing out to me the condition of the hops, as we 
passed one of his many hop-gardens. " It will be 
a poor year," he said, stopping short and looking 
intently before him — “no hops at all. No hops 
this autumn.” 

I looked at him. It was clear that he had no 
notion what he was saying. The dark-green bines 
were covered with fruit ; and only yesterday he 
himself had informed me that he had not seen such 
a profusion of hops for many years. 

I did not answer, and we walked on. A cart 
met us in a dip of the road, and the carter touched 
his hat and greeted Mr. Oke. But Oke took no 
heed ; he did not seem to be aware of the man’s 
presence. 

The clouds were collecting all round ; black 
domes, among which coursed the round grey masses 
of fleecy stuff. 

“ I think we shall be caught in a tremendous 
storm,” I said ; “ hadn’t we better be turning ? ” 
He nodded, and turned sharp round. 

The sunlight lay in yellow patches under the 
oaks of the pasture-lands, and burnished the green 


OKE OF OKEHURST. 


183 


hedges. The air was heavy and yet cold, and 
everything seemed preparing for a great storm. The 
rooks whirled in black clouds round the trees and 
the conical red caps of the oast-houses which give 
that country the look of being studded with turreted 
castles ; then they descended — a black line — upon 
the fields, with what seemed an unearthly loudness 
of caw. And all round there arose a shrill quaver- 
ing bleating of lambs and calling of sheep, while 
the wind began to catch the topmost branches of 
the trees. 

Suddenly Mr. Oke broke the silence. 

“ I don’t know you very well,” he began hur- 
riedly, and without turning his face towards me ; 
“ but I think you are honest, and you have seen 
a good deal of the world — much more than I. I 
want you to tell me — but truly, please — what do 

you think a man should do if” and he stopped 

for some minutes. 

“ Imagine,” he went on quickty, “ that a man 
cares a great deal — a very great deal for his wife, 
and that he find out that she — well, that — that she 
is deceiving him. No — don’t misunderstand me ; 
I mean — that she is constantly surrounded by some 
one else and will not admit it — some one whom 
she hides away. Do you understand ? Perhaps 
she does not know all the risk she is running, you 
know, but she will not draw back — she will not 
avow it to her husband ” 

" My dear Oke,” I interrupted, attempting to 


184 


HAUNTINGS. 


take the matter lightly, “ these are questions that 
can’t be solved in the abstract, or by people to 
whom the thing has not happened. And it cer- 
tainly has not happened to you or me.” 

Oke took no notice of my interruption. “You 
see,” he went on, “ the man doesn’t expect his wife 
to care much about him. It’s not that ; he isn’t 
merely jealous, you know. But he feels that she 
is on the brink of dishonouring herself — because I 
don’t think a woman can really dishonour her hus- 
band ; dishonour is in our own hands, and depends 
only on our own acts. He ought to save her, do 
you see ? He must, must save her, in one way or 
another. But if she will not listen to him, what 
can he do ? Must he seek out the other one, and 
try and get him out of the way ? You see it’s all 
the fault of the other — not hers, not hers. If only 
she would trust in her husband, she would be safe. 
But that other one won’t let her.” 

“ Look here, Oke,” I said boldly, but feeling 
rather frightened ; “ I know quite well what you 
are talking about. And I see you don’t under- 
stand the matter in the very least. I do. I have 
watched you and watched Mrs. Oke these six 
weeks, and I see what is the matter. Will you 
listen to me ? ” 

And taking his arm, I tried to explain to him my 
view of the situation — that his wife was merely 
eccentric, and a little theatrical and imaginative, and 
that she took a pleasure in teasing him. That he, 


OKE OF OKEHURST. 185 

On the other hand, was letting himself get into a 
morbid state ; that he was ill, and ought to see a 
good doctor. I even offered to take him to town 
with me. 

I poured out volumes of psychological explana- 
tions. I dissected Mrs. Oke’s character twenty 
times over, and tried to show him that there was 
absolutely nothing at the bottom of his suspicions 
beyond an imaginative pose and a garden-play on 
the brain. I adduced twenty instances, mostly in- 
vented for the nonce, of ladies of my acquaintance 
who had suffered from similar fads. I pointed out 
to him that his wife ought to have an outlet for 
her imaginative and theatrical over-energy. I ad- 
vised him to take her to London and plunge her 
into some set where every one should be more or 
less in a similar condition. I laughed at the notion 
of there being any hidden individual about the 
house. I explained to Oke that he was suffering 
from delusions, and called upon so conscientious 
and religious a man to take every step to rid him- 
self of them, adding innumerable examples of 
people who had cured themselves of seeing visions 
and of brooding over morbid fancies. I struggled 
and wrestled, like Jacob with the angel, and I really 
hoped I had made some impression. At first, 
indeed, I felt that not one of my words went into 
the man’s brain — that, though silent, he was not 
listening. It seemed almost hopeless to present 
my views in such a light that he could grasp them. 


1 86 


HAUNTINGS. 


I felt as if I were expounding and arguing at a 
rock. But when I got on to the tack of his duty 
towards his wife and himself, and appealed to his 
moral and religious notions, I felt that I was 
making an impression. 

“ I daresay you are right," he said, taking my 
hand as we came in sight of the red gables of Oke- 
hurst, and speaking in a weak, tired, humble voice. 
“ I don’t understand you quite, but I am sure what 
you say is true. I daresay it is all that I’m seedy. 

I feel sometimes as if I were mad, and just fit to 
be locked up. But don’t think I don’t struggle 
against it. I do, I do continually, only sometimes 
it seems too strong for me. I pray God night and 
morning to give me the strength to overcome my 
suspicions, or to remove these dreadful thoughts 
from me. God knows, I know what a wretched 
creature I am, and how unfit to take care of that 
poor girl." 

And Oke again pressed my hand. As we 
entered the garden, he turned to me once more. 

“ I am very, very grateful to you," he said, 
" and, indeed, I will do my best to try and be 
stronger. If only," he added, with a sigh, “ if 
only Alice would give me a moment’s breathing- 
time, and not go on day after day mocking me 
with her Lovelock." 


OKE OF OKEHURST. 


187 


IX. 

I had begun Mrs. Oke's portrait, and she was 
giving me a sitting. She was unusually quiet that 
morning ; but, it seemed to me, with the quietness 
of a woman who is expecting something, and she 
gave me the impression of being extremely happy. 
She had been reading, at my suggestion, the “ Vita 
Nuova,” which she did fiot know before, and the 
conversation came to roll upon that, and upon the 
question whether love so abstract and so enduring 
was a possibility. Such a discussion, which might 
have savoured of flirtation in the case of almost 
any other young and beautiful woman, became in 
the case of Mrs. Oke something quite different ; it 
seemed distant, intangible, not of this earth, like 
her smile and the look in her eyes. 

“ Such love as that," she said, looking into the 
far distance of the oak-dotted park-land, “ is very 
rare, but it can exist. It becomes a person's 
whole existence, his whole soul ; and it can survive 
the death, not merely of the beloved, but of the 
lover. It is unextinguishable, and goes on in the 
spiritual world until it meet a reincarnation of the 
beloved; and when this happens, it jets out and 
draws to it all that may remain of that lover's 
soul, and takes shape and surrounds the beloved 
one once more.” 

Mrs. Oke was speaking slowly, almost to her- 


i88 


HA UNTINGS. 


self, and I had never, I think, seen her look so 
strange and so beautiful, the stiff white dress 
bringing out but the more the exotic exquisiteness 
and incorporealness of her person. 

I did not know what to answer, so I said half 
in jest — 

“ I fear you have been reading too much 
Buddhist literature, Mrs. Oke. There is some- 
thing dreadfully esoteric in all you say.” 

She smiled contemptuously. 

“ I know people can’t understand such matters,” 
she replied, and was silent for some time. But, 
through her quietness and silence, I felt, as it 
were, the throb of a strange excitement in this 
woman, almost as if I had been holding her pulse. 

Still, I was in hopes that things might be 
beginning to go better in consequence of my 
interference. Mrs. Oke had scarcely once alluded 
to Lovelock in the last two or three days ; and 
Oke had been much more cheerful and natural 
since our conversation. He no longer seemed so 
worried ; and once or twice I had caught in him 
a look of great gentleness and loving-kindness, 
almost of pity, as towards some young and very 
frail thing, as he sat opposite his wife. 

But the end had come. After that sitting Mrs. 
Oke had complained of fatigue and retired to her 
room, and Oke had driven off on some business 
to the nearest town. I felt all alone in the big 
house, and after having worked a little at a sketch 


OKE OF OKEHURST. 189 

I was making in the park, I amused myself 
rambling about the house. 

It was a warm, enervating, autumn afternoon : 
the kind of weather that brings the perfume out 
of everything, the damp ground and fallen leaves, 
the flowers in the jars, the old woodwork and 
stuffs ; that seems to bring on to the surface of 
one’s consciousness all manner of vague recollec- 
tions and expectations, a something half pleasur- 
able, half painful, that makes it impossible to do or 
to think. I was the prey of this particular, not 
at all unpleasurable, restlessness. I wandered up 
and down the corridors, stopping to look at the 
pictures, which I knew already in every detail, 
to follow the pattern of the carvings and old stuffs, 
to stare at the autumn flowers, arranged in mag- 
nificent masses of colour in the big china bowls 
and jars. I took up one book after another and 
threw it aside ; then I sat down to the piano and 
began to play irrelevant fragments. I felt quite 
alone, although I had heard the grind of the 
wheels on the gravel, which meant that my host 
had returned. I was lazily turning over a book 
of verses — I remember it perfectly well, it was 
Morris’s 1 Love is Enough ’ — in a corner of the 
drawing-room, when the door suddenly opened 
and William Oke showed himself. He did not 
enter, but beckoned to me to come out to him. 
There was something in his face that made me 
start up and follow him at once. He was ex- 


HA UNTINGS. 


190 

tremely quiet, even stiff, not a muscle of his face 
moving, but very pale. 

“ I have something to show you,” he said, lead- 
ing me through the vaulted hall, hung round with 
ancestral pictures, into the gravelled space that 
looked like a filled-up moat, where stood the big 
blasted oak, with its twisted, pointing branches. 
I followed him on to the lawn, or rather the piece 
of park-land that ran up to the house. We walked 
quickly, he in front, without exchanging a word. 
Suddenly he stopped, just where there jutted out 
the bow-window of the yellow drawing-room, and 
I felt Oke’s hand tight upon my arm. 

“ I have brought you here to see something,” 
he whispered hoarsely ; and he led me to the 
window. 

I looked in. The room, compared with the 
out door, was rather dark ; but against the yellow 
wall I saw Mrs. Oke sitting alone on a couch in 
her white dress, her head slightly thrown back, 
a large red rose in her hand. 

“ Do you believe now ? ” whispered Oke’s voice 
hot at my ear. “ Do you believe, now ? Was it 
all my fancy ? But I will have him this time. 
I have locked the door inside, and, by God ! he 
shan’t escape.” 

The words were not out of Oke’s mouth. I felt 
myself struggling with him silently outside that 
window. But he broke loose, pulled open the 
window, and leapt into the room, and I after him. 


OKE OF OKEHURST. 


191 

As I crossed the threshold, something flashed in 
my eyes ; there was a loud report, a sharp cry, 
and the thud of a body on the ground. 

Oke was standing in the middle of the room, 
with a faint smoke about him ; and at his feet, 
sunk down from the sofa, with her blond head 
resting on its seat, lay Mrs. Oke, a pool of red 
forming in her white dress. Her mouth was con- 
vulsed, as if in that automatic shriek, but her 
wide-open white eyes seemed to smile vaguely 
and distantly. 

I know nothing of time. It all seemed to be 
one second, but a second that lasted hours. Oke 
stared, then turned round and laughed. 

“The damned rascal has given me the slip 
again ! ” he cried ; and quickly unlocking the door, 
rushed out of the house with dreadful cries. 

That is the end of the story. Oke tried to 
shoot himself that evening, J>ut merely fractured 
his jaw, and died a few days later, raving. There 
were all sorts of legal inquiries, through which I 
went as through a dream ; and whence it resulted 
that Mr. Oke had killed his wife in a fit of 
momentary madness. That was the end of Alice 
Oke. By the way, her maid brought me a locket 
which was found round her neck, all stained with 
blood. It contained some very dark auburn hair, 
not at all the colour of William Qke’s. I am quite 
sure it was Lovelock’s. 







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To M. W., 

IN REMEMBRANCE OF THE LAST SONG AT PALAZZO BARBARO. 
Chi ha inteso , intenda. 


They have been congratulating me again to- 
day upon being the only composer of our days 
— of these days of deafening orchestral effects and 
poetical quackery — who has despised the new- 
fangled nonsense of Wagner, and returned boldly 
to the traditions of Handel and Gluck and the 
divine Mozart, to the supremacy of melody and 
the respect of the human voice. 

O cursed human voice, violin of flesh and blood, 
fashioned with the subtle tools, the cunning hands, 
of Satan ! O execrable art of singing, have you 
not wrought mischief enough in the past, degrad- 
ing so much noble genius, corrupting the purity of 
Mozart, reducing Handel to a writer of high-class 
singing-exercises, and defrauding the world of the 
only inspiration worthy of Sophocles and Euripides, 

the poetry of the great poet Gluck ? Is it not 
195 


196 


HAUNTINGS. 


enough to have dishonoured a whole century in 
idolatry of that wicked and contemptible wretch 
the singer, without persecuting an obscure young 
composer of our days, whose only wealth is his 
love of nobility in art, and perhaps some few 
grains of genius ? 

And then they compliment me upon the per- 
fection with which I imitate the style of the great 
dead masters ; or ask me very seriously whether, 
even if I could gain over the modern public to 
this bygone style of music, I could hope to find 
singers to perform it. Sometimes, when people 
talk as they have been talking to-day, and laugh 
when I declare myself a follower of Wagner, I burst 
into a paroxysm of unintelligble, childish rage, and 
exclaim, “ We shall see that some day ! ” 

Yes ; some day we shall see ! For, after all, 
may I not recover from this strangest of maladies ? 
It is still possible that the day may come when 
all these things shall seem but an incredible night- 
mare ; the day when Ogier the Dane shall be com- 
pleted, and men shall know whether I am a 
follower of the great master of the Future or 
the miserable singing-masters of the Past. I am 
but half-bewitched, since I am conscious of the 
spell that binds me. My old nurse, far off in 
Norway, used to tell me that were-wolves are ordi- 
nary men and women half their days, and that 
if, during that period, they become aware of their 
horrid transformation they may find the means 


A WICKED VOICE. 


197 


to forestall it. May this not be the case with me ? 
My reason, after all, is free, although my artistic 
inspiration be enslaved ; and I can despise and 
loathe the music I am forced to compose, and the 
execrable power that forces me. 

Nay, is it not because I have studied with the 
doggedness of hatred this corrupt and corrupting 
music of the Past, seeking for every little pecu- 
liarity of style and every biographical trifle merely 
to display its vileness, is it not for this pre- 
sumptuous courage that I have been overtaken by 
such mysterious, incredible vengeance ? 

And meanwhile, my only relief consists in going 
over and over again in my mind the tale of my 
miseries. This time I will write it, writing only 
to tear up, to throw the manuscript unread into 
the fire. And yet, who knows ? As the last 
charred pages shall crackle and slowly sink into 
the red embers, perhaps the spell may be broken, 
and I may possess once more my long-lost liberty, 
my vanished genius. 

It was a breathless evening under the full moon, 
that implacable full moon beneath which, even 
more than beneath the dreamy splendour of noon- 
tide, Venice seemed to swelter in the midst of the 
waters, exhaling, like some great lily, mysterious 
influences, which make the brain swim and the 
heart faint — a moral malaria, distilled, as I thought, 
from those languishing melodies, those cooing 
vocalisations which I had found in the musty 


198 


HA UNTINGS. 


music-books of a century ago. I see that moon- 
light evening as if it were present. I see my 
fellow-lodgers of that little artists’ boarding-house. 
The table on which they lean after supper is 
strewn with bits of bread, with napkins rolled in 
tapestry rollers, spots of wine here and there, and 
at regular intervals chipped pepper-pots, stands of 
toothpicks, and heaps of those huge hard peaches 
which nature imitates from the marble-shops 
of Pisa. The whole pension-full is assembled, 
and examining stupidly the engraving which 
the American etcher has just brought for me, 
knowing me to be mad about eighteenth century 
music and musicians, and having noticed, as he 
turned over the heaps of penny prints in the 
square of San Polo, that the portrait is that of a 
singer of those days. 

Singer, thing of evil, stupid and wucked slave of 
the voice, of that instrument which was not invented 
by the human intellect, but begotten of the body, 
and which, instead of moving the soul, merely stirs 
up the dregs of our nature ! For what is the voice 
but the Beast calling, awakening that other Beast 
sleeping in the depths of mankind, the Beast which 
all great art has ever sought to chain up, as the 
archangel chains up, in old pictures, the demon 
with his woman’s face ? How could the creature 
attached to this voice, its owner and its victim, the 
singer, the great, the real singer who once ruled 
over every heart, be otherwise than wicked and 


A WICKED VOICE. 


199 

Contemptible ? But let me try and get on with 
m3' story. 

I can see all my fellow-boarders, leaning on the 
table, contemplating the print, this effeminate beau, 
his hair curled into ailes de pigeon , his sword 
passed through his embroidered pocket, seated 
under a triumphal arch somewhere among the 
clouds, surrounded by puffy Cupids and crowned 
with laurels by a bouncing goddess of fame. I 
hear again all the insipid exclamations, the insipid 
questions about this singer : — “ When did he live ? 
Was he very famous ? Are you sure, Magnus, that 
this is really a portrait," &c, &c. And I hear my 
own voice, as if in the far distance, giving them 
all sorts of information, biographical and critical, 
out of a battered little volume called The Theatre of 
Musical Glory ; or y Opinions upon the most Famous 
Chapel-masters and Virtuosi of this Century , by 
Father Prosdocimo Sabatelli, Barnalite, Professor 
of Eloquence at the College of Modena, and Member 
of the Arcadian Academy, under the pastoral name 
of Evander Lilybaean, Venice, 1785, with the ap- 
probation of the Superiors. I tell them all how this 
singer, this Balthasar Cesari, was nicknamed Zaffirino 
because of a sapphire engraved with cabalistic signs 
presented to him one evening by a masked stranger, 
in whom wise folk recognised that great cultivator of 
the human voice, the devil ; how much more wonder- 
ful had been this Zaffirino’s vocal gifts than those 
of any singer of ancient or modern times ; how his 


200 


HA UNTINGS. 


brief life had been but a series of triumphs, petted 
by the greatest kings, sung by the most famous 
poets, and finally, adds Father Prosdocimo, “ courted 
(if the grave Muse of history may incline her ear 
to the gossip of gallantry) by the most charming 
nymphs, even of the very highest quality.” 

My friends glance once more at the engraving ; 
more insipid remarks are made ; I am requested — 
especially by the American young ladies — to play 
or sing one of this Zaffirino’s favourite songs — 
“ For of course you know them, dear Maestro 
Magnus, you who have such a passion for all old 
music. Do be good, and sit down to the piano.” I 
refuse, rudely enough, rolling the print in my fingers. 
How fearfully this cursed heat, these cursed moon- 
light nights, must have unstrung me ! This Venice 
would certainly kill me in the long-run ! Why, the 
sight of this idiotic engraving, the mere name of that 
coxcomb of a singer, have made my heart beat and 
my limbs turn to water like a love-sick hobbledehoy. 

After my gruff refusal, the company begins to 
disperse ; they prepare to go out, some to have a 
row on the lagoon, others to saunter before the 
cafes at St. Mark's ; family discussions arise, grunt- 
ings of fathers, murmurs of mothers, peals of 
laughing from young girls and young men. And 
the moon, pouring in by the wide-open windows, 
turns this old palace ballroom, nowadays an inn 
dining-room, into a lagoon, scintillating, undulating 
like the other lagoon, the real one, which stretches 


A WICKED VOICE . 


201 


out yonder furrowed by invisible gondolas be- 
trayed by the red prow-lights. At last the whole 
lot of them are on the move. I shall be able 
to get some quiet in my room, and to work a 
little at my opera of Ogier the Dane. But no ! 
Conversation revives, and, of all things, about that 
singer, that Zaffirino, whose absurd portrait I am 
crunching in my fingers. 

The principal speaker is Count Alvise, an old 
Venetian with dyed whiskers, a great check tie 
fastened with two pins and a chain ; a threadbare 
patrician who is dying to secure for his lanky son 
that pretty American girl, whose mother is intoxi- 
cated by all his mooning anecdotes about the past 
glories of Venice in general, and of his illustrious 
family in particular. Why, in Heaven's name, 
must he pitch upon Zaffirino for his mooning, 
this old duffer of a patrician ? 

“ Zaffirino, — ah yes, to be sure ! Balthasar 
Cesari, called Zaffirino," snuffles the voice of Count 
Alvise^ who always repeats the last word of every 
sentence at least three times. “ Yes, Zaffirino, to 
be sure ! A famous singer of the days of my fore- 
fathers ; yes, of my forefathers, dear lady ! " Then 
a lot of rubbish about the former greatness of 
Venice, the glories of old music, the former Con- 
servatoires, all mixed up with anecdotes of Rossini 
and Donizetti, whom he pretends to have known* 
intimately. Finally, a story, of course containing 
plenty about his illustrious family : — “ My great 


202 


HA UN TINGS. 


grand-aunt, the Procuratessa Vendramin, from 
whom we have inherited our estate of Mistra, on 
the Brenta ” — a hopelessly muddled story, appa- 
rently, fully of digressions, but of which that 
singer Zaffirino is the hero. The narrative, little 
by little, becomes more intelligible, or perhaps it is 
I who am giving it more attention. 

“ It seems,” says the Count, “ that there was 
one of his songs in particular which was called the 
‘Husbands’ Air ’ — Id Aria dei Mariti —because they 
didn’t enjoy it quite as much as their better- 
halves. . . . My grand-aunt, Pisana Renier, married 
to the Procuratore Vendramin, was a patrician of 
the old school, of the style that was getting rare 
a hundred years ago. Her virtue and her pride 
rendered her unapproachable. Zaffirino, on his 
part, was in the habit of boasting that no woman 
had ever been able to resist his singing, which, 
it appears, had its foundation in fact — the ideal 
changes, my dear lady, the ideal changes a good 
deal from one century to another ! — and that 
his first song could make any woman turn pale 
and lower her eyes, the second make her madly in 
love, while the third song could kill her off on the 
spot, kill her for love, there under his very eyes, 
if he only felt inclined. My grand-aunt Vendramin 
laughed when this story was told her, refused to 
go to hear this insolent dog, and added that it 
might be quite possible by the aid of spells and 
infernal pacts to kill a gentildonna , but as to 


A WICKED VOICE. 


203 


making her fall in love with a lackey — never ! 
This answer was naturally reported to Zaffirino, 
who piqued himself upon always getting the better 
of any one who was wanting in deference to his 
voice. Like the ancient Romans, parcere subjedis et 
debellare superbos. You American ladies, who are 
so learned, will appreciate this little quotation from 
the divine Virgil.. While seeming to avoid the 
Procuratessa Vendramin, Zaffirino took the oppor- 
tunity, one evening at a large assembly, to sing in 
her presence. He sang and sang and sang until 
the poor grand-aunt Pisana fell ill for love. The 
most skilful physicians were kept unable to explain 
the mysterious malady which was visibly killing the 
poor young lady ; and the Procurator Vendramin 
applied in vain to the most venerated Madonnas, 
and vainly promised an altar of silver, with massive 
gold candlesticks, to Saints Cosmas and Damian, 
patrons of the art of healing. At last the brother- 
in-law of the Procuratessa, Monsignor Almoro Ven- 
dramin, Patriarch of Aquileia, a prelate famous for 
the sanctity of his life, obtained in a vision of Saint 
Justina, for whom he entertained a particular devo- 
tion, the information that the only thing which could 
benefit the strange illness of his sister-in-law was the 
voice of Zaffirino. Take notice that my poor grand- 
aunt had never condescended to such a revelation. 

“ The Procuratore was enchanted at this happy 
solution ; and his lordship the Patriarch went to 
seek Zaffirino in person, and carried him in his 


204 


HA UN TINGS. 


own coach to the Villa of Mistra, where the Pro- 
curatessa was residing. On being told what was 
about to happen, my poor grand-aunt went into 
fits of rage, which were succeeded immediately by 
equally violent fits of joy. However, she never for- 
got what was due to her great position. Although 
sick almost unto death, she had herself arrayed 
with the greatest pomp, caused her face to be 
painted, and put on all her diamonds : it would 
seem as if she were anxious to affirm her full 
dignity before this singer. Accordingly she re- 
ceived Zaffirino reclining on a sofa which had 
been placed in the great ballroom of the Villa of 
Mistra, and beneath the princely canopy; for the 
Vendramins, who had intermarried with the house 
of Mantua, possessed imperial fiefs and were princes 
of the Holy Roman Empire. Zaffirino saluted her 
with the most profound respect, but not a word 
passed between them. Only, the singer inquired 
from the Procuratore whether the illustrious lady 
had received the Sacraments of the Church. Being 
told that the Procuratessa had herself asked to be 
given extreme unction from the hands of her brother- 
in-law, he declared his readiness to obey the orders 
of His Excellency, and sat down at once to the 
harpsichord. 

11 Never had he sung so divinely. At the end 
of the first song the Procuratessa Vendramin had 
already revived most extraordinarily ; by the end 
of the second she appeared entirely cured and 


A WICKED VOICE. 


205 


beaming with beauty and happiness ; but at the 
third air — the Aria dei Mariti , no doubt — she began 
to change frightfully ; she gave a dreadful cry, and 
fell into the convulsions of death. In a quarter 
of an hour she was dead ! Zaffirino did not wait 
to see her die. Having finished his song, he with- 
drew instantly, took post-horses, and travelled day 
and night as far as Munich. People remarked that 
he had presented himself at Mistra dressed in 
mourning, although he had mentioned no death 
among his relatives ; also that he had prepared 
everything for his departure, as if fearing the wrath 
of so powerful a family. Then there was also the 
extraordinary question he had asked before begin- 
ning to sing, about the Procuratessa having con- 
fessed and received extreme unction. . . . No, 
thanks, my dear lady, no cigarettes for me. But if it 
does not distress you or your charming daughter, 
may I humbly beg permission to smoke a cigar?” 

And Count Alvise, enchanted with his talent 
for narrative, and sure of having secured for his 
son the heart and the dollars of his fair audience, 
proceeds to light a candle, and at the candle one 
of those long black Italian cigars which require 
preliminary disinfection before smoking. 

... If this state of things goes on I shall 
just have to ask the doctor for a bottle; this 
ridiculous beating of my heart and disgusting cold 
perspiration have increased steadily during Count 
Alvise's narrative. To keep myself in countenance 


20 6 


HA UNTINGS. 


among the various idiotic commentaries on this 
cock-and-bull story of a vocal coxcomb and a 
vapouring great lady, I begin to unroll the en- 
graving, and to examine stupidly the portrait of 
Zaffirino, once so renowned, now so forgotten. 
A ridiculous ass, this singer, under his triumphal 
arch, with his stuffed Cupids and the great fat 
winged kitchenmaid crowning him with laurels. 
How flat and vapid and vulgar it is, to be sure, 
all this odious eighteenth century ! 

But he, personally, is not so utterly vapid as I 
had thought. That effeminate, fat face of his is 
almost beautiful, with an odd smile, brazen and 
cruel. I have seen faces like this, if not in real 
Jife, at least in my boyish romantic dreams, when 
I read Swinburne and Baudelaire, the faces of 
wicked, vindictive women. Oh yes ! he is de- 
cidedly a beautiful creature, this Zaffirino, and his 
voice must have had the same sort of beauty and 
the same expression of wickedness. . . . 

u Come on, Magnus/' sound the voices of my 
fellow-boarders, u be a good fellow and sing us 
one of the old chap’s songs ; or at least something 
or other of that day, and we’ll make believe it was 
the air with which he killed that poor lady.” 

“ Oh yes! the Aria dei Mariti \ the ‘Husbands’ 
Air,”’ mumbles old Alvise, between the puffs at his 
impossible black cigar. “ My poor grand-aunt, 
Pisana Vendramin ; he went and killed her with 
those songs of his, with that Aria dci Mariti A 


A WICKED VOICE. 


207 


I feel senseless rage overcoming me. Is it that 
horrible palpitation (by the way, there is a Nor- 
wegian doctor, my fellow-countryman, at Venice 
just now) which is sending the blood to my' brain 
and making me mad ? The people round the 
piano, the furniture, everything together seems to 
get mixed and to turn into moving blobs of colour. 
I set to singing ; the only thing which remains dis- 
tinct before my eyes being the portrait of Zaffirino, 
on the edge of that boarding-house piano ; the 
sensual, effeminate face, with its wicked, cynical 
smile, keeps appearing and disappearing as the 
print wavers about in the draught that makes the 
candles smoke and gutter. And I set to singing 
madly, singing I don’t know what. Yes; I begin 
to identify it : ’tis the Biondina in Gondoleta, the 
only song of the eighteenth century which is still 
remembered by the Venetian people. I sing it, 
mimicking every old-school grace; shakes, cadences, 
languishingly swelled and diminished notes, and 
adding all manner of buffooneries, until the audience, 
recovering from its surprise, begins to shake with 
laughing ; until I begin to laugh myself, madly, 
frantically, between the phrases of the melody, 
my voice finally smothered in this dull, brutal 
laughter. . . . And then, to crown it all, I shake 
my fist at this long-dead singer, looking at me 
with his wicked woman’s face, with his mocking, 
fatuous smile. 

“ Ah ! you would like to be revenged on me 


2o8 


HA UN TINGS. 


also ! ” I exclaim. “ You would like me to write 
you nice roulades and flourishes, another nice 
Aria dei Mariti , my fine Zaffirino ! ” 

That night I dreamed a very strange dream. 
Even in the big half-furnished room the heat 
and closeness were stifling. The air seemed laden 
with the scent of all manner of white flowers, faint 
and heavy in their intolerable sweetness : tuberoses, 
gardenias, and jasmines drooping I know not where 
in neglected vases. The moonlight had transformed 
the marble floor around me into a shallow, shining 
pool. On account of the heat I had exchanged 
my bed for a big old-fashioned sofa of light wood, 
painted with little nosegays and sprigs, like an 
old silk ; and I lay there, not attempting to sleep, 
and letting my thoughts go vaguely to my opera 
of Ogier the Dane , of which I had long finished 
writing the words, and for whose music I had hoped 
to find some inspiration in this strange Venice, float- 
ing, as it were, in the stagnant lagoon of the past. 
But Venice had merely put all my ideas into hope- 
less confusion ; it was as if there arose out of its 
shallow waters a miasma of long-dead melodies, 
which sickened but intoxicated my soul. I lay on 
my sofa watching that pool of whitish light, which 
rose higher and higher, little trickles of light meeting 
it here and there, wherever the moon's rays struck 
upon some polished surface ; while huge shadows 
waved to and fro in the draught of the open balcony. 


A WICKED VOICE. 


209 


I went over and over that old Norse story : 
how the Paladin, Ogier, one of the knights of 
Charlemagne, was decoyed during his homeward 
wanderings from the Holy Land by the arts of 
an enchantress, the same who had once held in 
bondage the great Emperor Caesar and given him 
King Oberon for a son ; how Ogier had tarried in 
that island only one day and one night, and yet, 
when he came home to his kingdom, he found ajl 
changed, his friends dead, his family dethroned, 
and not a man who knew his face ; until at last, 
driven hither and thither like a beggar, a poor 
minstrel had taken compassion of his sufferings and 
given him all he could give — a song, the song of 
the prowess of a hero dead for hundreds of years, 
the Paladin Ogier the Dane. 

The story of Ogier ran into a dream, as vivid 
as my waking thoughts had been vague. I was 
looking no longer at the pool of moonlight spread- 
ing round my couch, with its trickles of light and 
looming, waving shadows, but the frescoed walls 
of a great saloon. It was not, as I recognised in 
a second, the dining-room of that Venetian palace 
now turned into a boarding-house. It was a far 
larger room, a real ballroom, almost circular in 
its octagon shape, with eight huge white doors 
surrounded by stucco mouldings, and, high on the 
vault of the ceiling, eight little galleries or recesses 
like boxes at a theatre, intended no doubt for 
musicians and spectators. The place was im- 

0 


2 IC 


HA UNTINGS. 


perfectly lighted by only one of the eight chan- 
deliers, which revolved slowly, like huge spiders, 
each on its long cord. But the light struck upon 
the gilt stuccoes opposite me, and on a large 
expanse of fresco, the sacrifice of Iphigenia, with 
Agamemnon and Achilles in Roman helmets, lappets, 
and knee-breeches. It discovered also one of the 
oil panels let into the mouldings of the roof, a 
goddess in lemon and lilac draperies, foreshortened 
over a great green peacock. Round the room, 
where the light reached, I could make out big 
yellow satin sofas and heavy gilded consoles ; in 
the shadow of a corner was what looked like a 
piano, and farther in the shade one of those big 
canopies which decorate the anterooms of Roman 
palaces. I looked about me, wondering where I 
was : a heavy, sweet smell, reminding me of the 
flavour of a peach, filled the place. 

Little by little I began to perceive sounds ; little, 
sharp, metallic, detached notes, like those of a 
mandoline ; and there was united to them a voice, 
very low and sweet, almost a whisper, which 
grew and grew and grew, until the whole place 
was filled with that exquisite vibrating note, of a 
Strange, exotic, unique quality. The note went 
on, swelling and swelling. Suddenly there was a 
horrible piercing shriek, and the thud of a body 
on the floor, and all manner of smothered ex- 
clamations. There, close by the canopy, a light 
suddenly appeared ; and I could see, among the 


A WICKED VOICE. 


211 


dark figures moving to and fro in the room, a 
woman lying on the ground, surrounded by other 
women. Her blond hair, tangled, full of diamond- 
sparkles which cut through the half-darkness, was 
hanging dishevelled ; the laces of her bodice had 
been cut, and her white breast shone among the 
sheen of jewelled brocade ; her face was bent 
forwards, and a thin white arm trailed, like a 
broken limb, across the knees of one of the women 
who were endeavouring to lift her. There was 
a sudden splash of water against the floor, more 
confused exclamations, a hoarse, broken moan, and 
a gurgling, dreadful sound. ... I awoke with a 
start and rushed to the window. 

Outside, in the blue haze of the moon, the 
church and belfry of St. George loomed blue and 
hazy, with the black hull and rigging, the red 
lights, of a large steamer moored before them. 
From the lagoon rose a damp sea-breeze. What 
was it all ? Ah ! I began to understand : that 
story of old Count A1 vise’s, the death of his grand- 
aunt, Pisana Vendramin. Yes, it was about that I 
had been dreaming. 

I returned to my room ; I struck a light, and 
sat down to my writing-table. Sleep had become 
impossible. I tried to work at my opera. Once 
or twice I thought I had got hold of what I had 
looked for so long. . . . But as soon as I tried to 
lay hold of my theme, there arose in my mind the 
distant echo of that voice, of that long note swelled 


212 


HAUNTINGS. 


slowly by insensible degrees, that long note whose 
tone was so strong and so subtle. 

There are in the life of an artist moments 
when, still unable to seize his own inspiration, or 
even clearly to discern it, he becomes aware of the 
approach of that long-invoked idea. A mingled 
joy and terror warn him that before another day, 
another hour have passed, the inspiration shall 
have crossed the threshold of his soul and flooded 
it with its rapture. All day I had felt the need 
of isolation and quiet, and at nightfall I went for 
a row on the most solitary part of the lagoon. All 
things seemed to tell that I was going to meet my 
inspiration, and I awaited its coming as a lover 
awaits his beloved. 

I had stopped my gondola for a moment, and 
as I gently swayed to and fro on the water, all 
paved with moonbeams, it seemed to me that I 
was on the confines of an imaginary world. It 
lay close at hand, enveloped in luminous, pale blue 
mist, through which the moon had cut a wide and 
glistening path ; out to sea, the little islands, like 
moored black boats, only accentuated the solitude 
of this region of moonbeams and wavelets ; while 
the hum of the insects in orchards hard by merely 
added to the impression of untroubled silence. On 
some such seas, I thought, must the Paladin Ogier, 
have sailed when about to discover that during 
that sleep at the enchantress's knees centuries had 


A WICKED VOICE. 


213 


elapsed and the heroic world had set, and the 
kingdom of prose had come. 

While my gondola rocked stationary on that sea 
of moonbeams, I pondered over that twilight of 
the heroic world. In the soft rattle of the water 
on the hull I seemed to hear the rattle of all 
that armour, of all those swords swinging rusty 
on the walls, neglected by the degenerate sons of 
the great champions of old. I had long been in 
search of a theme which I called the theme of the 
“ Prowess of Ogier ; ” it was to appear from time 
to time in the course of my opera, to develop at 
last into that song of the Minstrel, which reveals 
to the hero that he is one of a long-dead world. 
And at this moment I seemed to feel the presence 
of that theme. Yet an instant, and my mind 
would be overwhelmed by that savage music, 
heroic, funereal. 

Suddenly there came across the lagoon, cleaving, 
chequering, and fretting the silence with a lace- 
work of sound even as the moon was fretting and 
cleaving the water, a ripple of music, a voice break- 
ing itself in a shower of little scales and cadences 
and trills. 

I sank back upon my cushions. The vision of 
heroic days had vanished, and before my closed 
eyes there seemed to dance multitudes of little 
stars of light, chasing and interlacing like those 
sudden vocalisations. 

“ To shore ! Quick ! ” I cried to the gondolier. 


214 


HA UNTINGS. 


But the sounds had ceased ; and there came 
from the orchards, with their mulberry-trees glis- 
tening in the moonlight, and their black swaying 
cypress-plumes, nothing save the confused hum, 
the monotonous chirp, of the crickets. 

I looked around me : on one side empty dunes, 
orchards, and meadows, without house or steeple ; 
on the other, the blue and misty sea, empty to 
where distant islets were profiled black on the 
horizon. 

A faintness overcame me, and I felt myself dis- 
solve. For all of a sudden a second ripple of voice 
swept over the lagoon, a shower of little notes, 
which seemed to form a little mocking laugh. 

Then again all was still. This silence lasted so 
long that I fell once more to meditating on my 
opera. I lay in wait once more for the half-caught 
theme. But no. It was not that theme for which I 
was waiting and watching with baited breath. I 
realised my delusion when, on rounding the point 
of the Giudecca, the murmur of a voice arose from 
the midst of the waters, a thread of sound slender 
as a moonbeam, scarce audible, but exquisite, which 
expanded slowly, insensibly, taking volume and 
body, taking flesh almost and fire, an ineffable 
quality, full, passionate, but veiled, as it were, in 
a subtle, downy wrapper. The note grew stronger 
and stronger, and warmer and more passionate, 
until it burst through that strange and charming 
veil, and emerged beaming, to break itself in the 


A WICKED VOICE . 215 

luminous facets of a wonderful shake, long, superb, 
triumphant. 

There was a dead silence. 

“ Row to St. Mark’s ! ” I exclaimed. 11 Quick ! w 

The gondola glided through the long, glittering 
track of moonbeams, and rent the great band of 
yellow, reflected light, mirroring the cupolas of 
St. Mark’s, the lace-like pinnacles of the palace, 
and the slender pink belfry, which rose from the 
lit-up water to the pale and bluish evening sky. 

In the larger of the two squares the military 
band was blaring through the last spirals of a 
crescendo of Rossini. The crowd was dispersing 
in this great open-air ballroom, and the sounds 
arose which invariably follow upon out-of-door 
music. A clatter of spoons and glasses, a rustle 
and grating of frocks and of chairs, and the click 
of scabbards on the pavement. I pushed my way 
among the fashionable youths contemplating the 
ladies while sucking the knob of their sticks ; 
through the serried ranks of respectable families, 
marching arm in arm with their white frocked young 
ladies close in front. I took a seat before Florian’s, 
among the customers stretching themselves before 
departing, and the waiters hurrying to and fro, 
clattering their empty cups and trays. Two 
imitation Neapolitans were slipping their guitar 
and violin under their arm, ready to leave the 
place. 

“ Stop ! ” I cried to them ; “ don’t go yet. Sing 


21 6 


HA UNTINGS. 


me something — sing La Camesella or Funicul'i } 
funicula — no matter what, provided you make a 
row ; ” and as they screamed and scraped their 
utmost, I added, “ But can’t you sing louder, d — n 
you ! — sing louder, do you understand ? ” 

I felt the need of noise, of yells and false notes, 
of something vulgar and hideous to drive away* 
that ghost-voice which was haunting me. 

Again and again I told myself that it had been 
some silly prank of a romantic amateur, hidden in 
the gardens of the shore or gliding unperceived 
on the lagoon ; and that the sorcery of moonlight 
and sea- mist had transfigured for my excited brain 
mere humdrum roulades out of exercises of Bor- 
dogni or Crescentini. 

But all the same I continued to be haunted by 
that voice. My work was interrupted ever and 
anon by the attempt to catch its imaginary echo ; 
and the heroic harmonies of my Scandinavian 
legend were strangely interwoven with voluptuous 
phrases and florid cadences in which I seemed to 
hear again that same accursed voice. 

To be haunted by singing-exercises ! It seemed 
too ridiculous for a man who professedly despised 
the art of singing. And still, I preferred to be- 
lieve in that childish amateur, amusing himself 
with warbling to the moon. 

One day, while making these reflections the 
hundredth time over, my eyes chanced to light 


A WICKED VOICE. 


21 7 


upon the portrait of Zaffirino, which my friend 
had pinned against the wall. I pulled it down 
and tore it into half a dozen shreds. Then, 
already ashamed of my folly, I watched the ’torn 
pieces float -down from the window, wafted hither 
and thither by the sea-breeze. One scrap got 
caught in a yellow blind below me ; the others 
fell into the canal, and were speedily lost to sight 
in the dark water. I was overcome wilh shame. 
My heart beat like bursting. What a miserable, 
unnerved worm I had become in this cursed 
Venice, with its languishing moonlights, its atmo- 
sphere as of some stuffy boudoir, long unused, full 
of old stuffs and pot-pourri ! 

That night, however, things seemed to be going 
better. I was able to settle down to my opera, 
and even to work at it. In the intervals my 
thoughts returned, not without a certain pleasure, 
to those scattered fragments of the torn engraving 
fluttering down to the water. I was disturbed at 
my piano by the hoarse voices and the scraping of 
violins which rose from one of those music-boats 
that station at night under the hotels of the Grand 
Canal. The moon had set. Under my balcony 
the water stretched black into the distance, its 
darkness cut by the still darker outlines of the 
flotilla of gondolas in attendance on the music- 
boat, where the faces of the singers, and the 
guitars and violins, gleamed reddish under the 
unsteady light of the Chinese-lanterns. 


2 1 8 


HA UNTINGS . 


“ JammOy jatnmo ; jammo , jammo ja,” sang the 
loud, hoarse voices ; then a tremendous scrape and 
twang, and the yelled-out burden, “ Funiculi , funi- 
cula ; funiculi , funicula ; jammo , jammo , jammo, 
jammo , jammo ja.” 

Then came a few cries of Bis/” from a 

neighbouring hotel, a brief clapping of hands, the 
sound of a handful of coppers rattling into the 
boat, and the oar-stroke of some gondolier making 
ready to turn away. 

“ Sing the Camesella ,” ordered some voice with 
a foreign accent. 

“ No, no ! Santa Lucia.” 

“ I want the Camesella.” 

11 No ! Santa Lucia. Hi ! sing Santa Lucia — 
d’you hear ? ” 

The musicians, under their green and yellow and 
red lamps, held a whispered consultation on the 
manner of conciliating these contradictory demands. 
Then, after a minute’s hesitation, the violins began 
the prelude of that once famous air, which has 
remained popular in Venice — the words written, 
some hundred years ago, by the patrician Gritti, 
the music by an unknown composer — La Biondina 
in Gondoleta. 

That cursed eighteenth century ! It seemed a 
malignant fatality that made these brutes choose 
just this piece to interrupt me. 

At last the long prelude came to an end ; and 
above the cracked guitars and squeaking fiddles 


A WICKED VOICE. 


219 


there arose, not the expected nasal chorus, but a 
single voice singing below its breath. 

My arteries throbbed. How well I knew that 
voice ! It was singing, as I have said, below its 
breath, yet none the less it sufficed to fill all that 
reach of the canal with its strange quality of tone, 
exquisite, far-fetched. 

They were long-drawn-out notes, of intense but 
peculiar sweetness, a man’s voice which had much 
of a woman’s, but more even of a chorister’s, but a 
chorister’s voice without its limpidity and innocence ; 
its youthfulness was veiled, muffled, as it were, in 
a sort of downy vagueness, as if a passion of tears 
withheld. 

There was a burst of applause, and the old 
palaces re-echoed with the clapping. “ Bravo, 
bravo ! Thank you, thank you ! Sing again — 
please, sing again. Who can it be ? ” 

And then a bumping of hulls, a splashing of 
oars, and the oaths of gondoliers trying to push 
each other away, as the red prow-lamps of the 
gondolas pressed round the gaily lit singing- 
boat. 

But no one stirred on board. It was to none 
of them that this applause was due. And while 
every one pressed on, and clapped and vociferated, 
one little red prow- lamp dropped away from the 
fleet ; for a moment a single gondola stood forth 
black upon the black water, and then was lost in 
the night. 


220 


HA UNTINGS. 


For several days the mysterious singer was 
the universal topic. The people of the music-boat 
swore that no one besides themselves had been 
on board, and that they knew as little as ourselves 
about the owner of that voice. The gondoliers, 
despite their descent from the spies of the old 
Republic, were equally unable to furnish any clue. 
No musical celebrity was known or suspected to 
be at Venice ; and every one agreed that such 
a singer must be a European celebrity. The 
strangest thing in this strange business was, that 
even among those learned in music there was no 
agreement on the subject of this voice : it was 
called by all sorts of names and described by all 
manner of incongruous adjectives ; people went so 
far as to dispute whether the voice belonged to 
a man or to a woman : every one had some new 
definition. 

In all these musical discussions I, alone, brought 
forward no opinion. I felt a repugnance, an im- 
possibility almost, of speaking about that voice ; 
and the more or less commonplace conjectures of 
my friend had the invariable effect of sending me 
out of the room. 

Meanwhile my work was becoming daily more 
difficult, and I soon passed from utter impotence 
to a state of inexplicable agitation. Every morning 
I arose with fine resolutions and grand projects of 
work ; only to go to bed that night without hav- 
ing accomplished anything. I spent hours leaning 


A WICKED VOICE . 


221 


on my balcony, or wandering through the network 
of lanes with their ribbon of blue sky, endeavour- 
ing vainly to expel the thought of that voice, or 
endeavouring in reality to reproduce it in my 
memory ; for the more I tried to banish it from my 
thoughts, the more I grew to thirst for that extra- 
ordinary tone, for those mysteriously downy, veiled 
notes ; and no sooner did I make an effort to work 
at my opera than my head was full of scraps of 
forgotten eighteenth century airs, of frivolous or 
languishing little phrases ; and I fell to wondering 
with a bitter-sweet longing how those songs would 
have sounded if sung by that voice. 

At length it became necessary to see a doctor, 
from whom, however, I carefully hid away 'all the 
stranger symptoms of my malady. The air of the 
lagoons, the great heat, he answered cheerfully, had 
pulled me down a little ; a tonic and a month in 
the country, with .plenty of riding and no work, 
would make me myself again. That old idler, 
Count Alvise, who had insisted on accompanying 
me to the physician’s, immediately suggested that 
I should go and stay with his son, who was boring 
himself to death superintending the maize harvest 
on the mainland : he could promise me excellent 
air, plenty of horses, and all the peaceful surround- 
ings and the delightful occupations of a rural life 
— “Be sensible, my dear Magnus, and just go 
quietly to Mistra.” 

Mistra — the name sent a shiver all down me. 


222 


HA UNTINGS. 


I was about to decline the invitation, when a 
thought suddenly loomed vaguely in my mind. 

“ Yes, dear Count,” I answered ; 11 1 accept your 
invitation with gratitude and pleasure. I will start 
to-m6rrow for Mistra.” 

The next day found me at Padua, on my way 
to the Villa of Mistra. It seemed as if I had left 
an intolerable burden behind me. I was, for the 
first time since how long, quite light of heart. 
The tortuous, rough-paved streets, with their 
empty, gloomy porticoes; the ill-plastered palaces, 
with closed, discoloured shutters ; the little rambling 
square, with meagre trees and stubborn grass ; the 
Venetian garden-houses reflecting their crumbling 
graces in the muddy canal ; the gardens without 
gates and the gates without gardens, the avenues 
leading nowhere ; and the population of blind 
and legless beggars, of whining sacristans, which 
issued as by magic from between the flag- 
stones and dust-heaps and weeds under the fierce 
August sun, all this dreariness merely amused 
and pleased me. My good spirits were heightened 
by a musical mass which I had the good fortune 
to hear at St. Anthony’s. 

Never in all my days had I heard anything 
comparable, although Italy affords many strange 
things in the way of sacred music. Into the deep 
nasal chanting of the priests there had suddenly 
burst a chorus of children, singing absolutely inde- 


A WICKED VOICE. 


22 3 


pendent of all time and tune; grunting of priests 
answered by squealing of boys, slow Gregorian 
modulation interrupted by jaunty barrel-organ pip- 
ings, an insane, insanely merry jumble of bellowing 
and barking, mewing and cackling and braying, 
such as would have enlivened a witches’ meeting, 
or rather some mediaeval Feast of Fools. And, to 
make the grotesqueness of such music still more 
fantastic and Hoffmannlike, there was, besides, the 
magnificence of the piles of sculptured marbles 
and gilded bronzes, the tradition of the musical 
splendour for which St. Anthony's had been famous 
in days gone by. I had read in old travellers, 
Lalande and Burney, that the Republic of St. 
Mark had squandered immense sums not merely 
on the monuments and decoration, but on the 
musical establishment of its great cathedral of 
Terra Firma. In the midst of this ineffable 
concert of impossible voices and instruments, I 
tried to imagine the voice of Guadagni, the 
soprano for whom Gluck had written Che faro 
senza Euridice , and the fiddle of Tartini, that 
Tartini with whom the devil had once come and 
made music. And the delight in anything so 
absolutely, barbarously, grotesquely, fantastically 
incongruous as such a performance in such a 
place was heightened by a sense of profanation : 
such were the successors of those wonderful 
musicians of that hated eighteenth century ! 

The whole thing had delighted me so much, sq 


224 


HA UNTINGS. 


very much more than the most faultless perform- 
ance could have done, that I determined t'o enjoy 
it once more ; and towards vesper-time, after a 
cheerful dinner with two bagmen at the inn of 
the Golden Star, and a pipe over the rough sketch 
of a possible cantata upon the music which the 
devil made for Tartini, I turned my steps once 
more towards St. Anthony's. 

The bells were ringing for sunset, and a muffled 
sound of organs seemed to issue from the huge, 
solitary church ; I pushed my way under the 
heavy leathern curtain, expecting to be greeted by 
the grotesque performance of that morning. 

I proved mistaken. Vespers must long have 
been over. A smell of stale incense, a crypt-like 
damp filled my mouth ; it was already night in 
that vast cathedral. Out of the darkness glimmered 
the votive- lamps of the chapels, throwing wavering 
lights upon the red polished marble, the gilded 
railing, and chandeliers, and plaqueing with yellow 
the muscles of some sculptured figure. In a corner 
a burning taper put a halo about the head of a 
priest, burnishing his shining bald skull, his 
white surplice, and the open book before him. 
“Amen” he chanted; the book was closed with a 
snap, the light moved up the apse, some dark 
figures of women rose from their knees and passed 
quickly towards the door ; a man saying his 
prayers before a chapel also got up, making a 
great clatter in dropping his stick. 


A WICKED VOICE. 


225 


The church was empty, and I expected every 
minute to be turned out by the sacristan making 
his evening round to close the doors. I was lean- 
ing against a pillar, looking into the greyness of 
the great arches, when the organ suddenly burst out 
into a series of chords, rolling through the echoes 
of the church : it seemed to be the conclusion of 
some service. And above the organ rose the notes 
of a voice; high, soft, enveloped in a kind of downi- 
ness, like a cloud of incense, and which ran through 
the mazes of a long cadence. The voice dropped 
into silence ; with two thundering chords the 
organ closed in. All was silent. For a moment 
I stood leaning against one of the pillars of the 
nave : my hair was clammy, my knees sank 
beneath me, an enervating heat spread through 
my body ; I tried to breathe more largely, to suck 
in the sounds with the incense-laden air. I was 
supremely happy, and yet as if I were dying ; then 
suddenly a chill ran through me, and with it a 
vague panic. I turned away and hurried out into 
the open. 

The evening sky lay pure and blue along the 
jagged line of roofs ; the bats and swallows were 
wheeling about ; and from the belfries all around, 
half-drowned by the deep bell of St. Anthony’s, 
jangled the peel of the Ave Maria. 

“You really don’t seem well,” young Count 
Alvise had said the previous evening, as he wel- 

p 


226 


HA UN TINGS. 


corned me, in the light of a lantern held up by 
a peasant, in the weedy back-garden of the Villa 
of Mistra. Everything had seemed to me like a 
dream : the jingle of the horse’s bells driving in 
the dark from Padua, as the lantern swept the 
acacia-hedges with their wide yellow light ; the 
grating of the wheels on the gravel ; the supper- 
table, illumined by a single petroleum lamp for 
fear of attracting mosquitoes, where a broken old 
lackey, in an old stable jacket, handed round the 
dishes among the fumes of onion ; Alvise’s fat 
mother gabbling dialect in a shrill, benevolent voice 
behind the bullfights on her fan ; the unshaven 
village priest, perpetually fidgeting with his glass 
and foot, and sticking one shoulder up above the 
other. And now, in the afternoon, I felt as if I had 
been in this long, rambling, tumble-down Villa of 
Mistra — a villa three-quarters of which was given 
up to the storage of grain and garden tools, or to the 
exercise of rats, mice, scorpions, and centipedes — 
all my life ; as if I had always sat there, in Count 
Alvise’s study, among the pile of undusted books 
on agriculture, the sheaves of accounts, the samples 
of grain and silkworm seed, the ink-stains and the 
cigar-ends ; as if I had never heard of anything save 
the cereal basis of Italian agriculture, the diseases 
of maize, the peronospora of the vine, the breeds 
of bullocks, and the iniquities of farm labourers ; 
with the blue cones of the Euganean hills closing 
in the green shimmer of plain outside the window. 


A WICKED VOICE. 


227 


After an early dinner, again with the screaming 
gabble of the fat old Countess, the fidgeting and 
shoulder- raising of the unshaven priest, the smell 
of fried oil and stewed onions, Count Alvise made 
me get into the cart beside him, and whirled me 
along among clouds of dust, between the endless 
glister of poplars, acacias, and maples, to one of 
his farms. 

In the burning sun some twenty or thirty girls, 
in coloured skirts, laced bodices, and big straw-hats, 
were threshing the maize on the big red brick 
threshing-floor, while others were winnowing the 
grain in great sieves. Young Alvise III. (the 
old one was Alvise II. : every one is Alvise, that 
is to say, Lewis, in that family ; the name is on 
the house, the carts, the barrows, the very pails) 
picked up the maize, touched it, tasted it, said 
something to the girls that made them laugh, and 
something to the head farmer that made him look 
very glum ; and then led me into a huge stable, 
where some twenty or thirty white bullocks were 
stamping, switching their tails, hitting their horns 
against the mangers in the dark. Alvise III. 
patted each, called him by his name, gave him 
some salt or a turnip, and explained which was 
the Mantuan breed, which the Apulian, which the 
Romagnolo, and so on. Then he bade me jump 
into the trap, and off we went again through the 
dust, among the hedges and ditches, till we came 
to some more brick farm buildings with pinkish 


228 


HA UNTINGS. 


roofs smoking against the blue sky. Here there 
were more young women threshing and winnow- 
ing the maize, which made a great golden Danag 
cloud ; more bullocks stamping and lowing in 
the cool darkness ; more joking, fault-finding, ex- 
plaining ; and thus through five farms, until I 
seemed to see the rhythmical rising and falling of 
the flails against the hot sky, the shower of golden 
grains, the yellow dust from the winnowing-sieves 
on to the bricks, the switching of innumerable tails 
and plunging of innumerable horns, the glistening 
of huge white flanks and foreheads, whenever I 
closed my eyes. 

u A good day’s work ! ” cried Count Alvise, 
stretching out his long legs with the tight trousers 
riding up over the Wellington boots. “ Mamma, 
give us some aniseed-syrup after dinner ; it is 
an excellent restorative and precaution against the 
fevers of this country.” 

“ Oh ! you’ve got fever in .this part of the world, 
have you ? Why, your father said the air was so 
good ! ” 

11 Nothing, nothing,” soothed the old Countess. 
“ The only thing to be dreaded are mosquitoes ; 
take care to fasten your shutters before lighting 
the candle.” 

“ Well,” rejoined young Alvise, with an effort 
of conscience, “ of course there are fevers. But 
they needn’t hurt you. Only, don’ go out into 
the garden at night, if you don’t want to catch 


A WICKED VOICE . 


229 


them. Papa told me that you have fancies for 
moonlight rambles. It won’t do in this climate, 
my dear fellow ; it won’t do. If you must stalk 
about at night, being a genius, take a turn inside 
the house ; you can get quite exercise enough.” 

After dinner the aniseed-syrup was produced, 
together with brandy and cigars, and they all sat 
in the long, narrow, half-furnished room on the 
first floor ; the old Countess knitting a garment 
of uncertain shape and destination, the priest read- 
ing out the newspaper ; Count Alvise puffing at 
his long, crooked cigar, and pulling the ears of a 
long, lean dog with a suspicion of mange and a 
stiff eye. From the dark garden outside rose the 
hum and whirr of countless insects, and the smell 
of the grapes which hung black against the starlit, 
blue sky, on the trellis. I went to the balcony. 
The garden lay dark beneath ; against the twinkling 
horizon stood out the tall poplars. There was the 
sharp cry of an owl ; the barking of a dog ; a 
sudden whiff of warm, enervating perfume, a per- 
fume that made me think of the taste of certain 
peaches, and suggested white, thick, wax-like petals. 
I seemed to have smelt that flower once before : 
it made me feel languid, almost faint. 

“ I am very tired,” I said to Count Alvise. 
“ See how feeble we city folk become ! ” 

But, despite my fatigue, I found it quite im- 
possible to sleep. The night seemed perfectly 


230 


HA UNTINGS. 


stifling. I had felt nothing like it at Venice. 
Despite the injunctions of the Countess I opened 
the solid wooden shutters, hermetically closed 
against mosquitoes, and looked out. 

The moon had risen ; and beneath it lay the 
big lawns, the rounded tree-tops, bathed in a blue, 
luminous mist, every leaf glistening and trembling 
in what seemed a heaving sea of light. Beneath 
the window was the long trellis, with the white 
shining piece of pavement under it. It was so 
bright that I could distinguish the green of the 
vine-leaves, the dull red of the catalpa-flowers. 
There was in the air a vague scent of cut grass, 
of ripe American grapes, of that white flower (it 
must be white) which made me think of the taste 
of peaches all melting into the delicious freshness 
of falling dew. From the village church came the 
stroke of one : Heaven knows how long I had been 
vainly attempting to sleep. A shiver ran through 
me, and my head suddenly filled as with the fumes 
of some subtle wine ; I remembered all those weedy 
embankments, those canals full of stagnant water, 
the yellow faces of the peasants ; the word malaria 
returned to my mind. No matter ! I remained 
leaning on the window, with a thirsty longing to 
plunge myself into this blue moon-mist, this dew 
and perfume and silence, which seemed to vibrate 
and quiver like the stars that strewed the depths 
of heaven. . . . What music, even Wagner’s, or 
of that great singer of starry nights, the divine 


V 


A WICKED VOICE. 231 

Schumann, what music could ever compare with 
this great silence, with this great concert of voice- 
less things that sing within one’s soul ? 

As I made this reflection, a note, high, vibrat- 
ing, and sweet, rent the silence, which immediately 
closed around it. I leaned out of the window, my 
heart beating as though it must burst. After a 
brief space the silence was cloven once more by 
that note, as the darkness is cloven by a falling 
star or a firefly rising slowly like a rocket. But 
this time it was plain that the voice did not come, 
as I had imagined, from the garden, but from the 
house itself, from some corner of this rambling old 
villa of Mistra. 

Mistra — Mistrk ! The name rang in my ears, 
and I began at length to grasp its significance, 
which seems to have escaped me till then. 11 Yes,” 
I said to myself, “it is quite natural.” And with 
this odd impression of naturalness was mixed 
a feverish, impatient pleasure. It was as if I 
had come to Mistra on purpose, and that I was 
about to meet the object of my long and weary 
hopes. 

Grasping the lamp with its singed green shade, 
I gently opened the door and made my way 
through a series of long passages and of big, empty 
rooms, in which my steps re-echoed as in a church, 
and my light disturbed whole swarms of bats. I 
wandered at random, farther and farther from the 
inhabited part of the buildings. 


232 


HAUNTINGS. 


This silence made me feel sick ; I gasped as 
under a sudden disappointment. 

All of a sudden there came a sound — chords, 
metallic, sharp, rather like the tone of a mando- 
line — close to my ear. Yes, quite close : I was 
separated from the sounds only by a partition. I 
fumbled for a door ; the unsteady light of my 
lamp was insufficient for my eyes, which were 
swimming like those of a drunkard. At last I 
found a latch, and, after a moment’s hesitation, I 
lifted it and gently pushed open the door. At 
first I could not understand what manner of place 
I was in. It was dark all round me, but a brilliant 
light blinded me, a light coming from below and 
striking the opposite wall. It was as if I had 
entered a dark box in a half-lighted theatre. I 
was, in fact, in something of the kind, a sort of 
dark hole with a high balustrade, half-hidden by 
an up-drawn curtain. I remembered those little 
galleries or recesses for the use of musicians or 
lookers-on which exist under the ceiling of the 
ballrooms in certain old Italian palaces. Yes ; it 
must have been one like that. Opposite me was 
a vaulted ceiling covered with gilt mouldings, which 
framed great time-blackened canvases ; and lower 
down, in the light thrown up from below, stretched 
a wall covered with faded frescoes. Where had I 
seen that goddess in lilac and lemon draperies fore- 
shortened over a big, green peacock ? For she 
was familiar to me, and the stucco Tritons also 


A WICKED VOICE. 


2 33 


who twisted their tails round her gilded frame. 
And that fresco, with warriors in Roman cuirasses 
and green and blue lappets, and knee-breeches — 
where could I have seen them before ? I asked 
myself these questions without experiencing any 
surprise. Moreover, I was very calm, as one is 
calm sometimes in extraordinary dreams — could I 
be dreaming ? 

I advanced gently and leaned over the balus- 
trade. My eyes were met at first by the darkness 
above me, where, like gigantic spiders, the big 
chandeliers rotated slowly, hanging from the ceil- 
ing. Only one of them was lit, and its Murano- 
glass pendants, its carnations and roses, shone 
opalescent in the light of the guttering wax. This 
chandelier lighted up the opposite wall and that 
piece of ceiling with the goddess and the green 
peacock; it illumined, but far less well, a corner 
of the huge room, where, in the shadow of a kind 
of canopy, a little group of people were crowding 
round a yellow satin sofa, of the same kind as 
those that lined the walls. On the sofa, half- 
screened from me by the surrounding persons, 
a woman was stretched out : the silver of her 
embroidered dress and the rays of her diamonds 
gleamed and shot forth as she moved uneasily. 
And immediately under the chandelier, in the full 
light, a man stooped over a harpsichord, his head 
bent slightly, as if collecting his thoughts before 
singing. 


234 


HAUNTINGS. 


He struck a few chords and sang. Yes, sure 
enough, it was the voice, the voice that had so 
long been persecuting me ! I recognised at once 
that delicate, voluptuous quality, strange, exquisite, 
sweet beyond words, but lacking all youth and 
clearness. That passion veiled in tears which had 
troubled my brain that night on the lagoon, and 
again on the Grand Canal singing the Biondina , 
and yet again, only two days since, in the deserted 
cathedral of Padua. But I recognised now what 
seemed to have been hidden from me till then, that 
this voice was what I cared most for in all the 
wide world. 

The voice wound and unwound itself in long, 
languishing phrases, in rich, voluptuous rifiorituras , 
all fretted with tiny scales and exquisite, crisp 
shakes ; it stopped ever and anon, swaying as if 
panting in languid delight. And I felt my body 
melt even as wax in the sunshine, and it seemed to 
me that I too was turning fluid and vaporous, in 
order to mingle with these sounds as the moon- 
beams mingle with the dew. 

Suddenly, from the dimly lighted corner by the 
canopy, came a little piteous wail ; then another 
followed, and was lost in the singer’s voice. During 
a long phrase on the harpsichord, sharp and 
tinkling, the singer turned his head towards the 
dais, and there came a plaintive little sob. But 
he, instead of stopping, struck a sharp chord ; 
and with a thread of voice so hushed as to be 


A WICKED VOICE. 


2 35 


scarcely audible, slid softly into a long cadenza. 
At the same moment he threw his head backwards, 
and the light fell full upon the handsome, effeminate 
face, with its ashy pallor and big, black brows, of 
the singer Zaffirino. At the sight of that face, 
sensual and sullen, of that smile which was cruel 
and mocking like a bad woman’s, I understood — 
I knew not why, by what process — that his singing 
must be cut short, that the accursed phrase must 
never be finished. I understood that I was before 
an assassin, that he was killing this woman, and 
killing me also, with his wicked voice. 

I rushed down the narrow stair which led down 
from the box, pursued, as it were, by that exquisite 
voice, swelling, swelling by insensible degrees. I 
flung myself on the door which must be that of 
the big saloon. I could see its light between the 
panels. I bruised my hands in trying to wrench 
the latch. The door was fastened tight, and 
while I was struggling with that locked door I 
heard the voice swelling, swelling, rending asunder 
that downy veil which wrapped it, leaping forth 
clear, resplendent, like the sharp and glittering blade 
of a knife that seemed to enter deep into my 
breast. Then, once more, a wail, a death-groan, and 
that dreadful noise, that hideous gurgle of breath 
strangled by a rush of blood. And then a long 
shake, acute, brilliant, triumphant. 

The door gave way beneath my weight, one half 
crashed in. I entered. I was blinded by a flood 


236 


HA UNTINGS. 


of blue moonlight. It poured in through four 
great windows, peaceful and diaphanous, a pale 
blue mist of moonlight, and turned the huge room 
into a kind of submarine cave, paved with moon- 
beams, full of shimmers, of pools of moonlight. It 
was as bright as at midday, but the brightness was 
cold, blue, vaporous, supernatural. The room was 
completely empty, like a great hay-loft. Only, there 
hung from the ceiling the ropes which had once 
supported a chandelier and in a corner, among 
stacks of wood and heaps of Indian-corn, whence 
spread a sickly smell of damp and mildew, there 
stood a long, thin harpsichord, with spindle-legs, 
and its cover cracked from end to end. 

I felt, all of a sudden, very calm. The one thing 
that mattered was the phrase that kept moving in 
my head, the phrase of that unfinished cadence 
which I had heard but an instant before. I opened 
the harpsichord, and my fingers came down boldly 
upon its keys. A jingle-jangle of broken strings., 
laughable and dreadful, was the only answer. 

Then an extraordinary fear overtook me. I 
clambered out of one of the windows ; I rushed up 
the garden and wandered through the fields, among 
the canals and the embankments, until the moon 
had set and the dawn began to shiver, followed, 
pursued for ever by that jangle of broken strings. 


A WICKED VOICE. 


237 

People expressed much satisfaction at my re- 
covery. It seems that one dies of those fevers. 

Recovery ? But have I recovered ? I walk, 
and eat and drink and talk ; I can even sleep. I 
live the life of other living creatures. But I am 
wasted by a strange and deadly disease. I can 
never lay hold of my own inspiration. My head 
is filled with music which is certainly by me, since 
I have never heard it before, but which still is not 
my own, which I despise and abhor : little, tripping 
flourishes and languishing phrases, and long-drawn, 
echoing cadences. 

O wicked, wicked voice, violin of flesh and 
blood made by the Evil One's hand, may I not 
even execrate thee in peace; but is it necessary 
that, at the moment when I curse, the longing to 
hear thee again should parch my soul like hell- 
thirst ? And since I have satiated thy lust for 
revenge, since thou hast withered my life and 
withered my genius, is it not time for pity ?. May 
I not hear one note, only one note of thine, O 
singer, O wicked and contemptible wretch ? 


THE END, 



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She does not preach, but her stories are better than sermons. They touch the 
heart, they enlarge the sympathy, they excite every tender and noble emotion, 
they encourage religious feeling, and they deepen scorn for all that is mean and 
cowardly. They have abundance of fresh, delightful fun, and a pathos so true 
and deep that there are many of her stories which it is impossible to read without 
tears. There is nothing forced in her plots or her style. Her characters are 
natural, human, and have an indescribable charm. Children are delighted with 
her stories, and grown people rank them among the best things in literature. A 
few of her earlier tales lack the exquisite grace and marvellous lightness of touch, 
which, however, were to her a gift of nature, and even in her first volume 
(‘ Melchior’s Dream ’) there is work which she has never surpassed in beauty, and 
in the truth and tenderness of its teaching. ‘ Brothers of Pity,’ the leading story 
in a collection of 1 Tales of Beasts and Men,’ is perfect. It is original, quaint, wise ; 
it nourishes everything that is lovely in the character of a child, and gives charming 
glimpses of the grandfather and his library. ‘ Melchior’s Dream ’ is an allegory, 
but one which no reader will find dull. ‘Toots and Boots’ is a humorous cat 
story ; and ‘ The Blackbird’s Nest ’ puts the moral more distinctly than Mrs. Ewing 
often allows herself to do. ‘ J ackanapes ’ and ‘ The Story of a Short Life ’ are gener- 
ally considered the best of her stories, the finest touch of her genius. But ‘ Lob Lie- 
by-the-Fire’ should rank with them. The quaint, kind, gentle, innocent little old 
1 adies of Lingborough are as sweet and original and winning as any old ladies to be 
found in the whole range of fiction ; and the pictures of country life are exquisite 
sketches in the Crawford style, but too full of Mrs. Ewing’s own spirit and genius 
to be considered for a moment as imitations. ‘ Lob ’ is a powerful temperance 
story, and one that is wholly free from the faults that make nearly all temperance 
stories undesirable reading for young people, in spite of the important lessons 
they are written to impress. Neither children nor their elders can r ad too many 
of Mrs. Ewing’s stories. Only good can come from them , their influence is 
refining and ennobling.”— Boston Correspondent of the IVorcester Spy. 


4 


Frank F. Lovdl 6° Company's ' Publications . 


FOR MOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS. 

By Mrs. E. G. Cook, M.D. A book for all Women. Health and 
happiness for the children (home treatment), and a complete manual 
for the household. 400 pp., i6mo. Cloth. Gilt. Illustrated with 
numerous plates explanatory of the text. $1.50. 

“ The revised and enlarged edition of ‘ For Mothers and Daughters’ is one of 
the best works of the kind ever published. * * * * The volume has already 
passed through three large editions, and the improvements made for the fourth 
will make it still more valuable and warmly welcomed by that large class who find 
in it the information so greatly needed.” — Egbert Guernsey, M.D.,New York City. 

“As I am constantly contending with ignorance of the laws of health in parents, 
and the consequent sufferings and frailties of children, I welcome most heartily 
the revision of Mrs. Dr. Cook’s work, which has already, in its three large editions 
of ‘For Mothers and Daughters,’ done so much good. The knowledge we most 
need is that of ourselves. The cry of the present is for knowledge how to prevent 
our own sickness, and for our children to be well born. It is in answer to this 
appeal that this treatise has been sent out. I am sure that every man and woman 
who reads this book will thank the author for giving, from ripe experience cf over 
a quarter of a century, this vital and all-important information.”— Geo. E. Ship- 
man, M.D.,of the Foundlings' Home , Chicago, III. 

Christian at Work, New York, says : “A motherly, sisterly, sensible book.” 
New York Times says t “ A book of sound advice to women.” Southern World, 
Atlanta, Ga., says : “ We fancy husbands and fathers could appreciate the worth 
to them and their families of the contents of this book. Thousands of copies 
would find their way to the hands of wives, and would constitute a present far 
more acceptable than silks, furs or diamonds.” New York Medical Times says: 

Such books as this are to be welcomed as helpers on in the good cause of 
uplifting and perfecting humanity.” 

YONGE (CHARLOTTE M.). CHILD’S HISTORIES. 

Child’s History of France; i2mo, 288 pp., large type, cloth, 75 
cts. Child’s History of Germany; i2mo, 310 pp., large type, cloth, 
75 cts. 

DORE. BIBLE GALLERY. 

Bible Gallery of Illustrations and Stories. One large quarto 
volume, including 52 cartoons, and a portrait of Dore. Very finely 
printed and richly bound, extra cloth, beveled boards, gilt edges, 
gold title and ornamentation, price reduced from $5.00 to $2.50. 

“ The beautiful Bible stories gain a closeness of interpretation by the art of 
Dord that no other designer has reached, and thus they more deeply and per- 
manently influence the mind. This book is one of the cheapest and most valuable 
of all this publisher’s cheap and valuable books.”— Globe, Boston. 


s 


Prank F. Lovett 6° Company s Pubtications . 


SOCIAL SOLUTIONS. 

By M. Godin, Founder of the Familistere at Guise ; Prominent 
Leader of Industries in France and in Belgium ; Member of the 
National Assembly. Translated from the French by Marie How- 
land. i vol. Cloth. i2mo. Illustrated. $1.50. 

The most important work ever written upon the labor question, and the only 
one offering a practical solution of the subject of the relation of Capital to 
Labor. In a notice of the death of the celebrated author, the New York Tribune 
of January 31, 1888, says : “ The death of Mr. Godin, founder of the famous ‘ lamil- 
ist£re ’ of Guise, and that of Madame Boucicaut, not long preceding the former, 
bring two of the best-known co-operative enterprises of France to a critical stage. 
It is to be seen now whether these establishments can stand alone, without the aid 
and support of the strong minds that brought them into being. The ‘ familistere’ 
has long been noted among Socialistic undertakings, but not alone because of the 
number of working people concerned. There are less than half as many as in the 
big Paris shop of the Boucicauts, hardly one-tenth as many as in the Essen works 
of Krupp, which have some co-operative features. The building up of a town 
around a single great business, and with a special view to the comfort and happi- 
ness of the employes, is becoming more and more a feature of our civilization. Be- 
sides the Guise establishment we have Saltaire, founded by Sir Titus Salt, Essen, 
and in this country Pullman, which, considering its size and the careful provision 
made for the health, comfort and even the pleasures of the employes, is certainly 
not surpassed, if it is equalled, by any similar enterprise in the world, but which 
in its methods is decidedly paternal rather than co-operative.” 


THE CONDITION OF THE WORKING CLASS IN 
ENGLAND IN 1884. 

With Appendix written 18S6, and Preface 1887. By Frederick 
Engels. Translated by Florence Kelley Wischnewetzky. 1 vol. 
i2mo. Cloth. $1.25. 

A good exhibit is here made of the causes that led to a socialistic organi- 
zation and the line of action which the founder of Modern Socialism, Karl Marx, 
and the author of this volume followed for more than forty years. The principles 
of the order are concisely set forth in the Communist Manifesto” of 1847, given 
in the preface, which clearly defines them. Mr. Engel’s views and aspirations are 
comprehensive and far-reaching. It appears to him that “ the. Henry George 
platform, in its present shape, is too narrow to form the basis for anything but a 
local movement, or at best fora short-lived phase of the general movement.” The 
book is one those who would learn what the Socialistic Movement is, from its 
leading friends and advocates rather than from the misrepresentations of its 
enemies, should read and consider. 


6 


Frank F. Lovell 6r> Company's Publications. 


WRIGHT. BRICKS FROM BABEL. 

By Julia McNair Wright. Ideal Edition, fine cloth, beveled 
boards, gilt top. 75 cts. 

“ We know of no book in our language upon the migration of races at all to 
be compared with this. It gives a clear account of the wanderings and disper- 
sions of descendants of Noah, beginning with the dispersion of Babel, and showing 
the present location of the respective descendants. It is written in a style of 
grand eloquence, which renders the treatment of an apparently dry subject 
deeply interesting reading .” — The Interior , Chicago. 


GRACE GREENWOOD’S STORIES. 

New edition. The volumes are finely printed on heavy paper, 
illustrated, handsomely bound in cloth, with ink and gold stamping. 
Volumes sold separately. $1.00. 

I. Stories for Home Folks ; Stories and Sights of France and 
Italy. II. Stories from Famous Ballads; History of My Pets; 
Recollections of My Childhood. III. Stories of Many Lands ; 
Stories and Legends of Travel and History. IV. Merrie England; 
Bonnie Scotland. 

The following favorite volumes are published in cheaper form : 
My Pets, cloth, 60 cts. ; Stories for Home Folks, cloth, 75 cts". ; 
Stories of Travel and History, 60 cts. 

“ Most charming stories, some of them incidents in the lives of the great 
people of the earth, while others narrate events in the life of the author or her 
friends. Some places of interest are graphically described as by an eye-witness. 
The stories are equally interesting to old and young, and contain many useful 
bits of information that are thus easily acquired, and will remain with the reader 
for all time.” — Hawkeye , Burlington , la. 


HUGHES. THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST. 

By Thomas Hughes. Cloth. 40 cts. 

The manly author of “ Tom Brown at Rugby,” a favorite writer wherever the 
English language is read, here writes in a common-sense, forceful, and con- 
vincing way of the one ideal man— the lesson of his life for all who aspire to true 
manliness. 


ANDERSEN. 

Fairy Tales and Other Stories. By Hans Christian Andersen. 
In 4 vols., handsome cloth binding. $3.00. 


/ 


7 


Frank F. Lovell 6 ° Company's Publications. 


POETICAL CONCORDANCE. 

A Concordance to the Principal Poets of the World, embracing 
titles, first lines, characters, subjects and quotations. Compiled by 
Chas. A. Durfee. 639 pp., large i2mo. Bourgeois and Nonpareil 
type. Library Edition, extra cloth, gilt edges, ornamented. $1.75. 

Whatever knowledge you may seek concerning the literature embodied in the 
poetical works of nearly all of the great popular poets of the world, you will find 
here the key. 

“The value of such a work is evident upon its face .” — Christian Union , New 
York. 

“ A book for every library. As a complete general index to the poetry of the 
world, there is nothing like it .” — Saturday Herald , Indianapolis, Ind. 


GEORGE ELIOT’S WORKS. 

I.— FELIX HOLT. POEMS. 

II.— ROMOLA. ESSAYS. 

III. — THE MILL ON THE FLOSS. CLERICAL LIFE. 

IV. — ADAM BEDE. SILAS MARNER. THEOPHRASTUS 

SUCH. 

V.— DANIEL DERONDA. 

VI.— MIDDLEMARCH. 

Six volumes, i2mo. Half russia, in neat case, $9.00. Cloth, in 
neat case, $6.00. 


THREE STANDARD WORKS IN EXTRA CLOTH BINDING. 

COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO. 

By Alexander Dumas, author of “The Three Guardsmen,” 
“ Twenty Years After,” etc. 446 pp. i2mo. $1.50. 


LES MISERABLES. 

By Victor Hugo, author of “Notre Dame,” “Ninety-Three,” 
“Toilers of the Sea.” 1096 pp. i2mo. $1.50. 

TRAITS AND STORIES OF THE IRISH PEASANTRY. 

By William Carleton, author of “Willy Reilly,” etc. 979 pp. 
12-mo. $1.50. 







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No. 73 


50 Cents 


XovcU's llnternational Scries 


Hauntings 


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